How do we understand and analyze this? What concepts and frameworks help us see what is happening?
See the pedagogy document for what this lens does across all themes.
The concepts this lens builds are racial triangulation, racial scripts, orientalism, deportability, and the border as a method rather than a place. The through-line is that immigration law does not sort people who already have races. It makes the races it claims to sort. And it does not make them one at a time: the script written for one group is lifted and reused on the next, which is why this theme cannot be understood apart from Anti-Blackness and Racial Capitalism. The relation is the analysis.
Anchor questions
- If race were a single ladder from Black to white, where would Asian Americans stand? Why does the question break?
- What is the difference between being deported and being deportable? Which one does the work?
- Why would a state want a large population it can remove but does not remove?
- Said says the Orient was produced, not discovered. What is produced when someone is called “foreign” in the fourth generation?
- Whose script are you reading when a new group arrives and is described in words that sound oddly familiar?
Materials
Free unless marked otherwise. Kim is the shortest and the most load-bearing; start there.
The order is a field, not a line
- Claire Jean Kim, “The Racial Triangulation of Asian Americans” (1999). Asian Americans are racialized on two axes at once: valorized against Black Americans as the superior minority, and ostracized as permanently foreign no matter how many generations deep. Once you see the plane, “where does this group rank” stops being the right question. Short, free, and the fastest way to break the binary. Free PDF: library.fes.de
- Natalia Molina, How Race Is Made in America (2014). Gives the mechanism Kim’s geometry implies: “racial scripts” written for one group are lifted and reapplied to the next, so Mexican racialization only makes sense read alongside Black, Asian, and Native racialization. Race is made relationally or not at all. No borrowable copy exists. Paywalled: ucpress.edu
- Edward W. Said (1935 to 2003), Orientalism (1978). The East produced as an object of Western knowledge and rule, so that the Oriental is always essentially, unchangeably other. This is the “why” underneath Kim’s second axis: the foreigner is not a person who recently arrived, but a person who by definition cannot arrive. Free: archive.org
The border as a method of rule
- Harsha Walia, Border and Rule (2021). The border is not a line on a map but a technique: of imperial state formation, of labor control, of racist nationalism, and the technology is perfected outside the United States and imported. The key contemporary text for this theme. Not free, and worth getting; see the note on access. The Introduction is free as a proper excerpt: Columbia Law. Book: haymarketbooks.org
- Nicholas De Genova, “Migrant ‘Illegality’ and Deportability in Everyday Life” (2002). The concept that reorganizes the whole subject: what disciplines migrant labor is not deportation but deportability, the standing possibility of it. This is why the state does not actually want to remove everyone. A workforce that can be removed is more useful than one that has been. Thirty pages, free: icmigrations.cnrs.fr
- Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts (1996). Asian immigration is constitutive of the racialized economy, not incidental to it: included as labor and barred from the national culture at the same moment, producing the citizen who can never quite be a citizen. Canonical, and there is no free copy anywhere; see the note on access. Not free: dukeupress.edu
The arguments you will meet in the world
- Aviva Chomsky (b. 1957), “They Take Our Jobs!” And 20 Other Myths about Immigration (2007). Takes each anti-immigrant claim as a belief that does a job rather than a mistake to be corrected, and answers them one at a time. This is the empirical reply to the wage-depression argument that the liberatory lens stages, so read it before taking a side there. Free to borrow: archive.org
Further reading
For resources behind a paywall, see the note on access.
- Vijay Prashad, The Karma of Brown Folk (2000). Locates the model-minority myth in reaction against the Black freedom struggle and recovers a long history of Black and South Asian solidarity against it. Opens by asking Du Bois’s question back: how does it feel to be a solution? Not free: upress.umn.edu
- Nicholas De Genova, Detention, Deportation, and Waiting: Toward a Theory of Migrant Detainability (2016). Extends deportability into detention, on waiting itself as a technique of rule. Free: globaldetentionproject.org
Status
First pass, and it may be a while before there is a second. Lowe is the one canonical text with no free copy at all, and no free companion of comparable substance was found, so a group without library access will have to work around her. Contributions welcome, especially theory of race and migration from outside the United States and Europe.