Targeting Immigrants: Government, Technology, and Ethics

✍ Scribed by Jonath Xavier Inda

• Year: 2005
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 226
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This book is concerned with the government of “illegal” immigration since the passage of the U.S. Immigration Act of 1965, exploring how certain mentalities and intellectual machineries have rendered illegal immigrants as targets of government. Examines how various authorities have created knowledge about and constructed “illegal” immigration as an ethical problem. Analyzes the tactics that have been deployed to govern immigration, particularly at the US-Mexico border. Using an ethnographic approach, draws on primary source materials – including government publications, archival documents, newspapers, and popular magazines. Studies measures (e.g. Operation Gatekeeper and Operation Hold-the-Line) for reforming the conduct of “illegal” immigrants in order to forestall illicit border crossings. Frames the study of immigration within Foucauldian theories of governmentality. Highlights the role of numbers and statistics in constructing the “illegal” immigrant.

✦ Table of Contents

TARGETING IMMIGRANTS: Government, Technology, and Ethics......Page 5
Contents......Page 7
Acknowledgments......Page 9
Introduction: Government and Immigration......Page 11
PART ONE: Ethopolitics and the Management of In/security......Page 37
The Ethos of Responsibility......Page 39
Making Ethical Subjects......Page 42
The Government of the Marginal......Page 56
Racing the Unethical......Page 69
PART TWO: Producing “the Illegal,” or Making Up Subjects......Page 71
Government and Numbers......Page 73
Legislating Illegality......Page 77
Practices of Enumeration......Page 84
Surveying Routines......Page 104
Ethical Territories of Exclusion......Page 118
After 9/11......Page 123
PART THREE: Anti-Citizenship Technologies and the Regulation of the Border......Page 133
Governing Through Crime......Page 135
Interlude......Page 139
Assembling an Anti-Citizenship Technology......Page 141
Interlude......Page 147
Securitizing the Border......Page 149
Interlude......Page 160
The Aftermath of “Terror”......Page 163
Interlude......Page 169
The Surfeit of Dead Bodies......Page 171
Interlude......Page 181
Dying in Abandonment......Page 183
Conclusion: Iterations......Page 185
Notes......Page 189
References Cited......Page 200
Index......Page 218