Sameer Ashar & Amna Akbar: The Political Economy of Immigration Enforcement

Sameer Ashar (UCI) and Amna Akbar (Ohio State) have written a compelling and thoughtful two-part blog series on the Law and Political Economy Blog entitled, “The Political Economy of Immigration Enforcement.”

From the introduction:

“Liberals and progressives bemoan the problems of immigration enforcement and deportation along the vectors of racialization and criminalization. Their critique goes something like this: the immigration enforcement system is unfair in how it targets Black and Latinx and other immigrants of color, and this targeting has worsened as immigration enforcement has become increasingly entangled with criminal law enforcement. (A related concern has been that “immigrants are not criminals”: but both immigrant rights and racial justice movements have deconstructed and debunked this idea, since the meaning of what it is to be a criminal is just as raced and historically contingent as being an immigrant.) These concerns are played out in a field of celebratory narratives about the United States as a nation of immigrants, erasing the settler colonial routes of the country’s political and economic power.  By failing to consider questions of political economy—specifically how racial capitalism has shaped our present—these critiques lack explanatory power and historical grounding.”

Ashar and Akbar identify three specific implications in light of their focus on questions of political economy: “First, the growth of immigration enforcement is a constitutive part of the expansion of guard labor in the post-industrial, late capitalist phase of the United States, defined by austerity, mass criminalization, and mass incarceration. Second, immigration enforcement (both interior policing and the hardening of the southern border so as to trap migrants in the U.S.) creates an underclass of workers and reinforces the exorbitant power of employers. Third, immigration enforcement echoes and entrenches colonial logics by facilitating the extraction of human labor from poorer countries, borne by black and brown people, at the lowest possible cost.”

-JKoh