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The Disobedience of the Masses: Unauthorized Migration of Central Americans to the United States as an Act of Civil Disobedience Inauguraldissertation zur Erlangung des Grades eines Doktors der Philosophie dem Fachbereich Gesellschaftswissenschaften und Philosophie der Philipps-Universität Marburg vorgelegt von José Luis Rocha aus Managua, Nicaragua 2016 Vom Fachbereich Gesellschaftswissenschaften und Philosophie an der Philipps-Universität Marburg (Hochschulkennziffer 1180) als Dissertation angenommen am .... 29. November 2016.................................. Tag der Disputation / mündlichen Prüfung ...29. November 2016.......... 1. Gutachterin: Prof. Dr. Anika Oettler 2. Gutachter: Prof. Dr. Volker Wünderich ABSTRACT Around 12 million unauthorized immigrants live in the United States. This situation raises pressing questions that have received four types of answers in academia: 1) the response that complains about poor design of immigration policies, 2) the response that states that there is a clash between the transnational process of globalization and the old nationalistic immigration policies, 3) the response which historicizes the process of illegalization of immigrants, and 4) the response that is based on diverse forms of citizenship and national membership in which illegalization does not have the power of absolute exclusion. The present work seeks to make a contribution to this line of responses. My presentation of unauthorized migration as an act of civil disobedience is more intelligible within the framework of this debate. In my attempt to reframe the migrants’ non-authorized crossing of borders and their remaining in the United States, I seek to use civil disobedience as a category that can be given fresh significance through the study of the migrants’ struggle for inclusion. I want above all to stress the active role of the undocumented and the political significance of their actions. This work seeks to offer a perspective that makes visible the political nature of actions that are not usually considered such. The questioning that runs through this whole study is the following: What moves social change when it appears that nothing is moving? What makes for inclusion of this group of the excluded? The first chapter is an elaboration of my instruments through a type of archeological work that helped me to design the language for the third and fourth chapters. This preparatory work also helped me to give a name to the actions, to expose the traditions in which that language is inserted, and to reveal the ruptures that deepen the concepts I needed. After centuries of thinking with the categories of a tradition that restricts the confines of politics, extra effort is needed to give the political elements visibility in those places where they have taught us there is no politics. It is for that reason that the first chapter dedicates so much space to tracing the tradition back and to analyzing how and why it restricted the space for political actions and actors. At the end of the first chapter I explain my choice of civil disobedience as a way of framing the noncompliance of the immigrants, I reframe the noncompliance of the undocumented as “performative civil disobedience”, and I make an attempt at producing the translation between two (or more) traditions of thought by reflecting on different theories of civil disobedience and situating the contributions of Scott, Bayat, Foucault, Thompson, Rawls, and others within a current that breaks with the tradition and expands the field of acts and actors that can be considered political. The second chapter presents the forces that reject the immigrants: the policies and the actors, their interests and their contradictions. I start from the most general— the policies—and then continue with a thematic development that includes topics of more immediate relevance: the importance of geopolitics in migration policies, the violence in Central America as a reason for the migrations and for the granting of asylum, and the banopticon and the situation on the border. Instead of proposing that the anti-immigrant policies and their application provide the macro-vision in a holistic text, I present them as a backdrop that helps us to understand the dimensions of the challenge faced by an undocumented person. Examination of these policies also serves as a counterbalance to chapters three and four, which might give the impression that most of the surrounding conditions favor the undocumented. The third chapter is central to the work because it is dedicated to the actions of the immigrants themselves and because it is the chapter for which I did the archeological digging of the first chapter. In the third chapter I explain what I call “civil disobedience in everyday life”: those actions which advance the inclusion of undocumented immigrants in U.S. society and which therefore counteract the restrictions that impede such inclusion, as described in the second chapter. By performing such actions the undocumented engage in a daily struggle to gain for themselves the asylum that the U.S. government denies them. Such actions are not carried out in a collective or organized way, but their cumulative effect gives them decisive political weight. They are the prior condition for any pro-immigration activism. The undocumented are not passive subjects. This third chapter makes Marx’s politicization of the material world the backbone of my recasting of “material” actions as political actions. However, I have tried to enhance the Marxist contribution with the thought of authors who pay more attention to other, non-material dimensions. In the fourth chapter I chose three realms to illustrate how the performative civil disobedience of the undocumented is a form of citizenship in the making by virtue of its performative effectiveness and that of its support systems. They are support systems through whose reiteration and impacts, measured through interviews and participatory observation, seem substantial to me. Churches and migrant organizations are two of the main supports. The other is state heterogeneity, a recurrent element that at times has a visible presence and at other times sneaks in subtly or is barely discernible in the background. Addressing them independently allows me to complement the second chapter, where the excluding will of the state appears in a presentation true to reality – as can be inferred from the collection of data that support it, even though it is not complete. Churches, migrant organizations and state heterogeneity are three spheres of legitimation, and the lattermost, one of legal validation. The way is paved for the neutralizing the exclusions that I analyze in the second chapter by a combination of forces: some immigration legislation, heterogeneous bureaucratic regulations, discretionary enforcement of regulations, the solidarity work of the church, and that of the organizations of migrants themselves. In my fieldwork and my analysis I concentrate on undocumented Central American immigrants. Even though this study is focused on Central Americans, I believe that most of my exposition is valid also for migrants from other places, especially for Mexicans, who are the most numerous nationality both among Latinos and among foreigners in general. I concentrate on Central Americans in order to make a contribution and to set limits. I want to make a contribution because undocumented Central Americans in the United States are an immigrant group that, in comparison with other Latin Americans in the country, has scarcely been studied. In addition, they constitute the fastest-growing foreign group during the period between the last two national censuses, faster even than Latinos as a whole. Table of contents INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................................... 7 1. The unauthorized migration of Central Americans and its political aspect .. 7 2. Methodological considerations concerning the fieldwork and the handling of information .................................................................................................... 28 3. Structure, logic, and some limitations of the text ....................................... 32 CHAPTER 1. POLITICAL ACTS AND THE POLITICS OF THE PEOPLE WITHOUT POLITICS ............................................................................................ 36 1. The tradition of Western political thought and the people without politics . 37 2. Marxism as rupture and return to the Western tradition: the entry into history of those without politics ..................................................................... 40 3. Concepts for broadening the notion of political actions and political actors ...................................................................................................................... 43 3.1 Foucault: the courage to be a parrhesiast ........................................... 47 3.2 Scott: the weapons of the weak, the infrapolitics of hidden transcripts 48 3.3 Bayat: the silent encroachment of non-movements yields “life as politics” ...................................................................................................... 51 3.4 Thompson: the theater of the gentry and the plebeian counter-theater53 4. Civil disobedience as everyday politics and ideal type of expressing the struggles for inclusion ................................................................................... 55 4.1 Why civil disobedience? .....................................................................

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