Immigration Article of the Day: The Necropolitics of Immigration Enforcement by Abel Rodriguez
The Necropolitics of Immigration Enforcement by Abel Rodriguez,
Abstract
Racialized migration control policies increasingly subject migrants of color to systemic harms, including death. As the root causes of migration remain unaddressed, global forced displacement and migrant deaths have reached unprecedented levels while receiving states respond with increasingly violent and lethal force. In the United States, the Trump administration's policies have built upon decades-long restrictionist migration control strategies, culminating in widespread border deaths, the disappearance of migrants, pervasive detention, and mass deportations. Furthermore, recent Supreme Court doctrine has eroded protections for migrants targeted by the immigration enforcement system, particularly in the critical contexts of immigration detention and deportation. This evolution of immigration law and policy has resulted in irreparable harms, including diminished rights, deleterious health effects, and record levels of documented migrant deaths, with the Mexico-U.S. border now representing the deadliest land migration route in the world while the immigration enforcement system perpetuates migrant mortality.
This Article provides a novel perspective on state violence and immigration enforcement. It provides a genealogy of contemporary migration control practices through the lens of necropolitics, arguing that immigration law and policy perpetuating migrant death represent a primary pillar of the nation's departure from democracy. Necropolitics provides a framework to understand how the state increasingly wields power over life and death. When applied to current U.S. immigration policy, this framing offers new understanding of the resurgence of nativist sentiments, the motivations for racialized exclusion, and their respective broader implications for diminishing democracy. After mapping both spectacular and slow deaths of migrants in the enforcement system, this Article examines the forces causing displacement and policies increasingly empowering state violence to curb the resultant migration to the United States. Ultimately, as the nation endures a restrictionist Supreme Court and a second Trump term focused on violent exclusion and mass deportations, this Article addresses the urgent need for non-reformist reforms to preserve migrant life and reorient democratic principles.
