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Colonial Modes of Immigration Management and the Ambivalent Resilience of the Empire State

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Colonial Modes of Immigration Management and the Ambivalent Resilience of the Empire State Rethinking the Politics of Immigration: Colonial Modes of Immigration Management and the Ambivalent Resilience of the Empire State A Dissertation SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Mark N. Hoffman IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Raymond Duvall, Lisa J. Disch July, 2013 © Mark N. Hoffman 2013 Acknowledgements I would like to thank my esteemed advisors, Lisa Disch and Raymond Duvall, for their extraordinary guidance, encouragement, and patience throughout my graduate school career and during each and every phase of my research and writing. They are the best teachers and mentors a graduate student could hope for, and it has been a great privilege to work with them. I am also deeply indebted to my committee members, Antonio Vazquez-Arroyo and Patricia Lorcin. Their inspiration and advice over the past four years has been invaluable. This project would not have been possible without the encouragement and tireless help of my longtime advisor, colleague, and close friend, the indispensable Andrew Davison. My parents, Drs. Ann and Irwin Hoffman, and my brother, Daniel, are phenomenal teachers to whom I’ve turned repeatedly for support and who have more than once rescued me from doctoral despair. I must also thank my intellectual interlocutor, my other brother, Anthony Pahnke, and his family, Marlene Rojas, Mary-Ann Pahnke, and Armond Pahnke, for all their support and guidance. For reading and commenting on various chapters and parts of this dissertation, and for all the inspiring conversations in classrooms, conferences, coffee shops, and bars, I would like to thank Arjun Chowdhury, a brilliant colleague, friend, and co-author to whose coattails I still cling, and also Himadeep Muppidi, Charmaine Chua, Quynh Pham, Brendan Cooper, Jackie Burns, Chiana Loreti, Christine Wegner, Luke Harris, and Kimberlé Crenshaw, Carlos Marentes, Mariano Espinoza, Victor Contreras, and Ruth Snyder My copyeditor, muse, and partner, the incomparable Jenna G. Laffin, offered invaluable critical commentary on each and every page of this dissertation. During the last phases of solitary writing, when the rigors of revision were throwing the more frightening implications of contemporary bordering practices into sharper relief, Jenna’s intellectual and emotional presence proved an uplifting source of encouragement, inspiration, and hope. i Introduction 1 Chapter 1 Colonial Borders, New World Orders: Servants, Slaves, and the Founding Divisions of Labor in Nations of Immigrants 35 Chapter 2 Policing the West: Migration, National-Societal Insecurity, and the Empire State 79 Chapter 3 Worksites, Schools, and Welcome Centers: The Colonial Incorporation of Immigrants as Aliens 125 Chapter 4 Imperial Economies, Western Workforces, and Colonial Subjects: A Postcolonial Reconsideration Labor and Migration 183 Chapter 5 Ambivalence, Breakdowns, and Transpolitical Resistance: Emergenc(i)es of Colonial Immigration Management 232 Conclusion Beyond Biopolitics: Immigration Management and the Postcolonial Imperative 278 Bibliography 296 ii Introduction Racism is constantly emerging out of nationalism, not only towards the exterior, [but also]towards the interior. In the United States, systematic institutional segregation, which put a halt to the first civil rights movement, coincided with America’s entry into world imperialist competition with it subscribing to the idea that the Nordic races had a hegemonic mission. In France, elaboration of an ideology of the French race, rooted in the past of ‘the soil and the dead,’ coincided with the beginning of mass immigration, the preparation for revenge against Germany, and the founding of the colonial empire.1 Étienne Balibar On September, 22, 2009, hundreds of French riot police from the Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité (CRS) descended upon the Calais “Jungle,” a camp of makeshift tents near the French port sheltering more than 800 Afghan, Iraqi, and Iranian migrants seeking work and asylum in the United Kingdom. Most, if not all, of the English-speaking migrants were escaping violence in Afghanistan and Iraq and seeking low-skilled jobs in the homeland of their regions’ former colonizer, the empire-state for whom their ancestors toiled as colonial subjects. Many of these migrants had helped British and American forces in their campaigns against Saddam Hussein and the Taliban, and were suffering the consequences of their collaboration with Western forces.2 The agency in charge of the Jungle mission, the notorious CRS, was first deployed as riot police tasked with restoring order in France after the liberation from Nazi forces, and subsequently in Algeria to re-establish French dominion in the colony after World War II.3 CRS officers played an integral role in Charles de Gaulle’s counterinsurgency campaign in Algeria. The campaign itself was dramatized in Gillo Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers, the anti-colonial masterpiece now used by American security officials (with little sense of irony) to train American troops in the art of counterinsurgency.4 1 Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein. Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities. New York: Verso, 1991. p.56. 2 Field notes: Calais, 2009. My accounts of contemporary policing activity in Calais, Paris, and Marseilles are based on 5 months of field research in France in Fall of 2009 and Summer of 2010. 3 Jean-Louis Courtois and Michel Lejeune. Les CRS en Algerie: 1952-1962, La Face Meconnue du Mantien de l’Ordre. (Paris: Marine Éditions, 2010); CRS D’Algiers memorial manual. Biblioteque National de Paris. 4 See extra features interviews with counterterrorism officials in Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers, extended anniversary edition. 1 Back in the French metropole, the CRS had been empowered by the government of Nicolas Sarkozy to suppress political dissent, break strikes, and to police communities of immigrants in metropolitan centers, port cities like Marseilles and Calais, and the impoverished banlieues outside of Paris. In particular, they were deployed to monitor, control, and harass impoverished communities comprised primarily of migrants from former French colonies in Africa. Their latest job was to protect France’s age-old foe, now-turned-European-ally, the United Kingdom, from the brown-skinned descendants of Britain’s own colonial subjects from the Middle East. These English-speaking subjects - everyone from doctors to truck drivers – sought jobs in low-wage, low-status sectors of the British economy. In Calais, the CRS used tear gas, dogs, and overwhelming force to subdue both the offending migrant population and its activist supporters. They demolished the tent city and arrested 278 people, including over 150 minors. The operation was not merely a conventional defense of law and order and of French and British national security. More than this, the mission was designed, as one British official put it, “not only to strengthen [the] shared border, but that of Europe as a whole.”5 A year earlier, on May 12, 2008, over 900 heavily armed officers drove a caravan of black trucks through the back roads of southern Iowa to Postville, site of Agriprocessors, the largest Kosher meatpacking plant in the United States. The officers were agents of United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), an organization established by the Bush administration to “protect America” by “eliminating vulnerabilities that pose a threat to our nation’s borders.”6 The Postville mission: to detain immigrant workers from Latin America en masse for “Aggravated Identity Theft,” the crime codified by the 2004 Identity Theft Penalty Enhancement Act. ICE sought to arrest nearly 700 workers that day, one fourth of the town’s population. Of the 390 workers they found and arrested on the shop floor, 383 were Hispanic. Actively recruited by Agriprocessors, these workers had traveled 1800 miles from their native Guatemala to work under harsh factory conditions for minimum wage on the plant’s cut-and-kill 5 Angelique Cristaphis. “French Police Clear the ‘Jungle’ Migrant Camp in Calais.” The Guardian. Tuesday, 22 September, 2009. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/sep/22/french-police-jungle-calais (Accessed 7/9/2012) 6 http://www.ice.gov/doclib/careers/pdf/investigator-brochure.pdf (Accessed 5/24/2012) 2 assembly line. By the time of the raid, the workers and their families had made Postville one of the most prosperous small towns in the American Heartland. They and other improperly documented Latin American immigrant workers were responsible for revitalizing a meatpacking industry that had been shaken up by the historic labor union strikes of the 1980s. The immigrant workers had settled with their families. They had built relationships and alliances with local residents and workers and, with them, had transformed Postville’s cultural and political landscape. They offered the possibilities of new local and transnational attachments and ways of life. The raids all but destroyed these possibilities. Contemporary policies and practices of immigration management reveal a paradox at the heart of contemporary global capitalism. On the one hand, individuals in the roles of producers, consumers, and investors seem to move freely across national borders, similar to money and commodities (both human and non-human), in an increasingly borderless or “flat” world.7 On the other hand, millions of immigrant workers from former European colonies – re-presented in the post-colonial era as “developing countries” – face a proliferating array
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