Migration, Institutional Violence, and Reproducing the Carceral State

Panel Abstract

Although the U.S. response to immigration is frequently treated at political and societal levels as a self-contained problem to be mitigated, eliminated, or, at times, even embraced, immigration in its historic and contemporary instances has never been self-contained or isolated. It has always been connected at the social, structural, and epistemic levels with other types of injustice. By framing immigration policy, practice, and cultural responses through the lens of disability theory, administratively supported violence, epistemic injustice, and the reconstruction of citizenship, this panel seeks to identify, critique, and respond to such simplified narratives of immigration.

The panel builds from the work of a number of philosophical traditions in the Americas, in many ways redrawing the standards lines of American Philosophy in order to support newer understandings of the field like those put forth in the SAAP 2020 conference theme. Specifically, taking up a move toward an Inter-American Philosophy, the panel develops its work through the lens of transnational disability critique, Latinx feminism, Indigenous studies, epistemologies of ignorance, epistemic violence and epistemic injustice, and decolonial theory.

Consisting of four papers, the panel fills in the interstitial understandings of immigration and immigration injustice though highlighting the gaps in our framings of immigration, spaces that keep us from understanding the power and trajectory of the current U.S. political narrative on immigration and borders. The papers in the panel also propose new theoretical and policy frameworks to provide alternative understandings and practices for immigration justice.

The first paper, ““The Atlas of Our Skin and Bone and Blood”: Disability, Ablenationalism, and the Criminalization of Immigration,” draws on transnational disability critique to examine the formation and maintenance of a form of ablenationalism operating within immigration in the United States, Mexico, and parts of Central America. This paper examines the coupling of the enhanced militarization of border zones alongside increasing austerity measures impacting people throughout North and Central America as indicative of governmental attempts to shape and constrain notions of public health, safety, and security. The next paper in the panel, “Structural and Administrative Violence at the US-Mexico Settler Border,” develops a broader picture of administratively supported violence to identify its epistemic dimensions and uncover the epistemologies that are required to maintain the regenerative nature of settler epistemic credibility economies. The paper utilizes the notion of a modal profile in order to illuminate the self-regenerating nature of structural violence predicated on colonial epistemicide. The third paper, “Epistemic Deadspaces: Immigration, Politics, and Displacement,” develops the concept of epistemic deadspaces to shape an understanding of the epistemic dimensions of immigrant detention and frame it in relation to other types of injustices. Epistemic deadspaces are habitats designed to displace, confine, hide, and shutdown epistemic efficacy and contain people who in many ways are political prisoners—immigrants, Indigenous and First Nations peoples, prison inmates—people whose existence cause a level of social, psychological and epistemological discomfort to those on the “outside.” The final paper in the panel, “When Did Amnesty Become Unthinkable?: Immigration Reform and the Construction of Citizenship,” works to understand how migration has become framed, in new ways, as threatening Namely, the paper illustrates how techniques of power that construct citizenship have been altered and proliferated, and such changes are evident in how discourses of “amnesty” have evolved over time.