View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by SHAREOK repository UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA GRADUATE COLLEGE MAKING SENSE OF U.S. IMMIGRATION POLICY: VIOLENCE, AGENCY, AND INTERSECTIONALITY IN POLICY, PAST AND PRESENT A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE FACULTY In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS IN INTERNATIONAL STUDIES By MEAGAN HARDEN Norman, Oklahoma 2020 MAKING SENSE OF U.S. IMMIGRATION POLICY: VIOLENCE, AGENCY, AND INTERSECTIONALITY IN POLICY, PAST AND PRESENT A THESIS APPROVED FOR THE COLLEGE OF INTERNATIONAL STUDIES BY THE COMMITTEE CONSISTING OF Dr. Emma Colven, Chair Dr. Miriam Gross Dr. Misha Klein © Copyright by MEAGAN HARDEN 2020 All Rights Reserved. Table of Contents Abstract .......................................................................................................................................... vi Chapter One. Making Sense of U.S. Immigration Policy: Violence, Agency, and Intersectionality in Policy, Past and Present .............................................................................................................. 1 Chapter Two. Re/Producing Exclusion: Legal and Discursive Precedents of the 2020 Birth Tourism Regulation ...................................................................................................................... 20 Chapter Three. Moving From, Through and Into the Structural Violence of Forced Migration: Myint and Su ................................................................................................................................. 37 Conclusion: Cultivating Hope....................................................................................................... 64 References ..................................................................................................................................... 68 Table of Figures Figure 1 ........................................................................................................................................... 3 Figure 2 ......................................................................................................................................... 22 Figure 3 ......................................................................................................................................... 30 Figure 4 ......................................................................................................................................... 45 Figure 5 ......................................................................................................................................... 52 Figure 6 ......................................................................................................................................... 53 iv Acknowledgements First, my gratitude to my parents, who have been incredibly supportive throughout my life; and to my brilliant niece Harlow, whose smiles have gotten me through many a tough day of writing. I am also grateful to the members of the 2020 MAIS cohort for their company and commiseration these past two years; to the faculty and staff of CIS —especially Katie Watkins, whose humor and expertise have kept so many students afloat, and Dr. Mark Raymond, whose thoughtful reassurance and mentorship are an invaluable addition to Farzaneh Hall; and to Dr. Chie Noyori-Corbett, for the compassion and candor with which she leads. This thesis would be either a wisp of an idea or a chaotic slew of half-thoughts were it not for the guidance and feedback of my incredible thesis committee: Dr. Miriam Gross, whose nocturnal office hours and willingness to chat have proved an immense source of both baked goods and reassurance to many an insomniac graduate student; Dr. Misha Klein, whose commitment to social justice consistently challenges me to think more critically and act with more empathy; and Dr. Emma Colven, thesis chair and human extraordinaire, who has been the most supportive, encouraging, and inspiring role model throughout my graduate studies. Finally, my profound gratitude to Myint and Su for sharing their stories and their time, and for steering their lives towards hope. If there were ever a reason to keep fighting for justice, these women are it. v Abstract Since President Trump took office in 2017, he has implemented dozens of restrictive immigration laws at the expense of women and people of color. The rapid barrage of policies has confounded international and domestic commentators alike, prompting outrage and a sense of powerlessness. In this thesis, I interrogate the historical underpinnings of Trump-era immigration policies to demonstrate the deep-seated racism and sexism that have informed American immigration policy dating back to the nineteenth century. I apply an intersectional framework to the 2020 birth tourism regulation, which discriminates against women from non-Western countries, and well as interviews with two women resettling as refugees in Oklahoma City who navigate the U.S. resettlement program’s emphasis on employment at the expense of language. In doing so, I present immigration policy as a political tool that disproportionately impacts women of color and whose structural violences continue long past a migrant’s arrival in a new location. In centering intersectionality and agency alongside structural violence, I contribute to literature on “borderscapes,” which seeks to amplify the possibilities for hope, opposition, and counter-hegemonic political agency in the context of exclusionary globalization. Keywords: birth tourism, borderscapes, forced migration, Visa Waiver Program, refugee resettlement, intersectionality, immigration policy, birthright citizenship vi Chapter One. Making Sense of U.S. Immigration Policy: Violence, Agency, and Intersectionality in Policy, Past and Present Despite the expansion and increasing flows of people, capital, and ideas across borders under the current moment of globalization, the past three decades have witnessed an acceleration of border construction and the re-entrenchment of the nation-state’s role in geopolitical order. In addition to physical barriers, state and non-state actors implement legal mechanisms, economic restrictions, and myriad other means of controlling, denying or deterring entry into certain spaces. Border conflicts the world over, ranging from India and Pakistan’s disagreement over Kashmir to Russia’s annexation of Crimea from the Ukraine, both Hong Kong’s and Taiwan’s contested sovereignty from China, and First Nations’ centuries-long fight to reclaim sovereignty from North American governments, have profound implications for people living within and outside of state borders. These conflicts and the violence they inflict upon human and nonhuman lives are enabled —indeed, created— by the systems of political power that the territorial boundary of “the border” represents. As a relatively recent phenomenon, what are the long-term implications of borders, especially for people seeking to move across them? In this thesis, I zoom out from “the border” to view the actors, structures, and environments that surround it. I look at the ways in which economic, political, and historical contexts converge to re/produce, challenge, or otherwise engage with the border as not simply a physical boundary, but also a discursive and political mechanism of control and contestation. In doing so, I frame the Trump administration’s restrictive approach to immigration policy within critical border studies scholarship that rejects the border as inevitable or apolitical, 1 and instead interrogates the material, discursive, and processual attributes that make borders sites of conflict, violence, generation, and hope. I focus on the 2020 birth tourism regulation and the U.S. refugee resettlement program to demonstrate that the Trump administration uses immigration policy as a political tool that produces both deliberate and inadvertent violence against certain bodies according to race, nationality and geopolitical relationships, and gender. Through policies that securitize and externalize America’s physical borders, the Trump administration pursues exclusionary prerogatives in ways that align with the generally taken-for- granted role of national borders. Borders in Context: Material and Immaterial Processes of Power Although the contemporary state system assumes that people belong in particular states, the linkage between territory and sovereignty is a relatively recent phenomenon (Betts, 2015). Marking the end of the Thirty Years’ War in Europe, the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia codified what is now referred to as the Westphalian state system, or the use of territorial boundaries to denote sovereign entities. Through European colonization, the practice of denoting realms of governance with territorial demarcations proliferated into the current Westphalian state system (Jones et al., 2017; Benton, 2010). However, borders are not arbitrary lines drawn on maps or carved into earth; rather, they are the material and immaterial assertions of power that seek to contain, deter, or otherwise control human mobility. Borders can therefore be biopolitical as a way to control life or necropolitical as a way to control death (Foucault, 1979; Mbembe, 2003). In their many material and immaterial forms, borders are therefore inherently political sites of state sovereignty and power. The Materiality of Borders 2 Physically, borders inhibit or enable the movement of people, capital, and goods across space. In recent