Beyond the Border Spectacle: Transnational Class Struggle and Migrant Liminality in the United States

• In Event: 345 - Section on Political Economy of the World-System Paper Session. Global Class Relations and the New "Precariate"

Abstract

While there is a broad consensus among the political elite and the general public that the U.S. immigration system is “broken,” a common response from the Left is that it is exploitative by design. This paper synthesizes these two positions and highlights the struggles of undocumented migrants and global capital to, respectively, contest or reconstitute the hegemony of the latter. The NAFTA-era regime of migration control was a confluence of the policies of forced migration, illegalization and border militarization. Confronted with the growing intransigence of the burgeoning undocumented population—in the form of union organizing during the late 1990s, the mass mobilizations of early 2006, and recent crossborder resistance to unprecedented levels of deportation—capital has sought to institute new forms of “guest worker” programs in order to assert greater control over undocumented labor. Without undermining the importance of grassroots opposition, I view the inability of the political elite in Washington to reach a consensus and pass so-called Comprehensive Immigration Reform as a manifestation of the current disjuncture between global capital and nation-state-based forms of political authority. The Obama Administration's “deferred action” programs should thus not be conceived of as mere stopgap measures and a prelude to a larger bill, but rather a novel system of control. In a dialectical analysis, I explore the implications of such a liminal legal status—as well as the legacy of mass deportation—for transnational working class solidarity.

Author

• David Feldman, University of California-Santa Barbara