A More Profound Problem: Immigration Policy and Hierarchies of Citizenship in the Argentine Racial State

• In Event: 3113 - Immigration, Citizenship and Globalization

Abstract

While the Argentine state has been on the frontlines in developing progressive human rights based immigration policies in the 21st century; recent changes reveal the continued influence of racialized constructions of nationhood on state responses to migration. This paper explores the state and media response to a crime that took place in Buenos Aires in December of 2016. This crime led to the death of a 14-year-old youth—and while the accused were neither foreigners nor proven guilty of committing this crime—it became understood by state actors as the “final straw,” requiring immigration policy change. Through in-depth analysis of media and state discourse surrounding this crime, I reveal how the birthright citizenship of one of the accused was erased from Argentine public imagination, turning him into a metonym for all issues of migration control. I argue here that this reality dually exposes the limits of human-rights based immigration policy when it is undergirded by exclusionary hierarchies of citizenship and national belonging, as well as the fragile citizenship of those who are marked as non-white in the Buenos Aires and the broader Argentine context.

Author

• Maria Barbero, Florida International University