Analysis is one thing, the order of exposition is another. As regards the presentation, rather than making a selection, I have separated the facts into excluding forces and including forces. I hope that this division is an aid to pedagogical clarity and that it will help to move the reader little by little from more familiar themes and approaches (chapter two) to a less common treatment of the facts (chapter three). The first chapter is an elaboration of my instruments, which is placed at the beginning even though the instruments are designed to treat the material and the themes of chapter three, namely, the ways in which immigrants carry out their noncompliance in everyday life and the significance of those actions as political struggle. As I reviewed the literature on migrations and attempted to extract the nuggets from my material, I became aware that most of the concepts being used did not allow me to demonstrate the political character of those actions.
It is for this reason that the first chapter engages in a little archeology of Western political thought, the purpose of which is trace the origins of the reductions in the political sphere that have historically defined labor, the actions of the dominated, and everyday material as outside the realm of politics. This archeological investigation was not foreseen at the start, but I judged it essential as I went about assembling facts that were not considered political.
1 Febvre, 1982, p.22.
2 Febvre, 1982, p.23.
After centuries of thinking with the categories of a tradition that restricts the confines of politics, extra effort is needed to make the political elements apparent in those places where they have taught us there is no politics. It is for that reason that the first chapter dedicates so much space to tracing the tradition back and to analyzing how and why it delimited the space for political actions and actors.
At the end of the first chapter I explain why I chose the reflections on civil disobedience as a way of framing the noncompliance of the immigrants, and I make an attempt at producing the translation between two (or more) traditions of thought that Sousa wanted. I hope that I have succeeded in situating the contributions of Scott, Bayat, and others within a current that breaks with the tradition and expands the field of acts and actors that can be considered political.
The second chapter presents the forces that reject the immigrants: the policies and the actors, their interests and their contradictions. I start from the most general—the policies—and then continue with a thematic development that includes topics of more immediate relevance: the importance of geopolitics in migration policies, the violence in Central America as a reason for the migrations and for the granting of asylum, and the banopticon and the situation on the border.
Instead of proposing that the anti-immigrant policies and their application provide the macro-vision in a holistic text, I present them as a backdrop that helps us to understand the dimensions of the challenge faced by an undocumented person. Examination of the policies also serves as a counterbalance to chapters three and four. In the second chapter I tried to concentrated on my strong points, the aspects about which I am most knowledgeable: the history of Central Americans seeking refuge in the United States, and some aspects of U.S. foreign policy.
The situation of the undocumented is a spatialized sociopolitical condition,1 and that is why so much of my analysis is dedicated to the border.
The third chapter is central to the work because it is dedicated to the actions of the immigrants themselves and because it is the chapter for which I did the prior archeological digging of the first chapter. I believe that its major challenge is that of avoiding the facile tautology of presenting every act of the undocumented as an act of defiance and civil disobedience. I agree with Bayat that “the lack of a clear concept of resistance … often leads writers in this genre to overestimate and read too much into the acts of the agents. The result is that almost any act of the subjects potentially becomes one of ‘resistance.’”2 The same applies to civil disobedience,
1 De Genova, 2005, p.215.
2 Bayat, 2010, p.55.
even when it is considered as an ideal type. That is why I refer to and apply some of the findings of the theories of civil disobedience, always keeping in mind that they can be discarded depending on how we view the reality. Parodying a little Woody Allen sketch about Abraham Lincoln, I can say: “How long must a theory be? Long enough to reach the ground!” Concepts were a criterion for avoiding tautology, but they were meaningful and had that effect only when they could name realities. That is, they were effective only when they could point out practices of parrhesia, legitimization, massification of noncompliance, similarities with traditional acts of civil disobedience, attainment of perlocutionary effects, and the exercise of rights that express the efficacy of civil disobedience and proclaim de facto inclusion.
The fourth chapter includes the forces which validate and support the immigrants’ civil disobedience in day-to-day life. I do not offer a history of the organizations of Central Americans in the United States because that is not my precise theme. However, I could not avoid expatiating a bit because even books on Salvadorans as significant as Susan Bibler Countin’s Nation of Emigrants make no mention of the Central American Resource Center (CARECEN). Also, I felt a need to show that the immigrants are constantly creating new, informal, autonomous institutions with agendas molded by their everyday needs and free of the influence of the big foundations.
The section on the heterogeneity of state policies is professedly aimed at refuting the thesis that illegalization is the government’s basic position and that the immigrants encounter only hostile forces in the area of law enforcement and the public sector in general. It can be shown, as I make clear in the second chapter, that undocumented immigrants are a segment of the working class that is “subjected to excessive and extraordinary forms of policing [and] denied fundamental human rights,” as De Genova maintains.1 Nevertheless, the evidence collected does not corroborate the thesis that undocumented persons (not to speak of the group of Mexican immigrants studied by De Genova) are “consigned to an always uncertain social predicament, often with little or no recourse to any semblance of protection from the law.”2 Among the first to refute this affirmation would be the tens of thousands of lawyers who earn their living by taking the cases of undocumented persons in the immigration courts and other venues. They belong to an industry that has prospered thanks to the great complexity and the many restrictions of immigration legislation. They often despair that their work can succeed in such complicated conditions, but they manage to win cases against the ICE, the prosecutors, and abusive employers.
1 De Genova, 2005, p.229.
2 De Genova, 2005, p.229.
If the government were a monolithic entity uniformly hostile toward the immigrants and if having recourse to the law were useless, then their small individual battles would be lost causes, and the telephone directory would undergo a severe procedure of liposuction.
As is obvious, when I present information about the opinions of Border Patrol officers or ex-officers, I depend exclusively on secondary sources. If I had had direct contact with those “on the other side,” there is no doubt that valuable elements would have been added to the analysis and these would have given more vitality to the exposition. But I do not believe that they would have persuaded me to make any substantial changes in my arguments. On the other hand, I regret that I did not interview any functionaries whose social work put them in contact with the undocumented. The section on street-level bureaucracy contains both intuition and concept, as Kant desired, and it also has the life that the migrants breathed into it in the interviews, but it is lacking the other perspective, which in this case would have been decisive. I became aware of these missing elements too late, only when I was reflecting on the interviews. But let the defect be taken as a benefit: having the Atlantic between us was an excellent disincentive, preventing me from adding interminable annexes to the fieldwork and enabling me to bring this work to a happy conclusion.
CHAPTER 1. POLITICAL ACTS AND THE POLITICS OF THE PEOPLE WITHOUT