Anis Shivani: A radical new approach to the immigration “problem”: Beyond left and right, Trumpism and neoliberalism — Part two
Anis Shivani on Salon provides another installment on immigration. Read the first part of this series here (and here). His premise: Immigration law also restricts the rights of American citizens:
“Whatever starts out as restricting the human rights of the most vulnerable among us — including undocumented immigrants, because the sword of deportation is always hanging above their heads — eventually gets extended to legal immigrants and finally to citizens. The disciplinary state chooses immigrants as the first arena for implementation of human rights restrictions, knowing that the hue and cry will be limited, and will provide a sense of normalization about illegalities that would be more difficult if directly imposed on citizens.
It is not coincidental that when neoliberalism was consolidated in the mid-1990s, welfare, terrorism and immigration legislation were passed in the same year, and in fact bore close resemblance to each other and even overlapped.”
Next time: Amid the abundant contradictions of immigration law, an unanswered question: Do undocumented immigrants have constitutional rights?
KJ