P.J. Brendese
IMMIGRATION, BIOPOLITICS AND SEGREGATED TIME

CONTEMPORARY IMMIGRATION DEBATES ARE FREQUENTLY STUDIED AS POPULATION FLOWS across spatial borders, with relatively less scholarly reflection on how the stakes of those debates are framed and contested in terms of time. The insufficiency persists despite the glaringly obvious temporal dimensions of neo-nativist arguments in the U.S. on behalf of reclaiming a past of patriarchal, white-governed, national greatness—partisans plainly seeking to turn back the clock. Such right-wing rallying cries articulate a broader desire for protection against a future of empowered minority groups who are simultaneously perceived as advancing too fast and whose respective differences are stigmatized as being backward, less evolved or behind the times.

The problem is only accelerated by queue-jumping foreigners who refuse to either wait their turn for citizenship or accept indefinite banishment—the latter being the stated preference among those who frequently invoke the epidemiological rhetoric of an “infestation” or military invasion. From the standpoint of time, then, it follows that calls to “build the wall” should also be heard as temporal desires expressed in spatial terms. On the left, pro-immigration advocates frequently, and uncritically, valorize the indispensability of immigrant labor. The logic that immigrants do the jobs that Americans will not, or cannot do, perpetuates an already enduring biopolitics whereby the extended lifetimes of dominant populations are leveraged on the foreshortened lifespans of racial others. Either stated or implied, a working premise is that a steady supply of cheap and plentiful immigrant workers is necessary to provide citizens with the accoutrements of twenty-first century digital capitalism, even if it means that immigrant others toil in conditions evocative of the nineteenth century.

When examined through an aperture of race and time, ostensibly opposing political ideologies toward immigration on the left and right betray dangerously corresponding logics of power. It is an alignment that effectively, if unwittingly, amounts to an unholy alliance around the disposability of immigrant lives and the perpetuation of segregated time. By considering immigration in terms of segregated time, as opposed to just segregated space, I make a case for a dimensional perspective to acknowledge and contest the racialized “marks of the border” that go missing when migration is addressed with respect to territoriality alone. At the same time, I adopt a time-sensitive approach to biopolitics where race is a key index separating who lives and who dies. Conceptually, Foucauldian biopolitics helps register the mortal stakes of immigration policy. Nevertheless, it becomes an impaired prism when problematically invoked to render traditional forms of state sovereignty entirely obsolete, when it treats the sovereign right to kill as if it were quaint, and regards the power of discipline and spectacle as outmoded relics of the past. When today’s political entrepreneurs deploy epidemiological rhetoric to dehumanize migrants, casting them as diseases or vectors of infection, they invoke the well-worn “plague dream” of a disciplinary society with a perpetually imperiled future and a present always in need of quarantine, surveillance and purification in the face of an epidemic threat. At the same time, however, neo-nativists also utilize disciplinary spectacles to dramatize immigrant threats in the service of biopolitical, race-making projects capable of maintaining an endemic, exploitable domestic reserve population of laborers, soldiers, and subjects for the settler state to draw upon over the long term—particularly during times of crisis. 

Internally, the use of immigrant populations to shore up contingency and emergent resource shortages overlaps with the ways in which racial others are often viewed as asynchronous and needing to “catch up” with their citizen counterparts in order to achieve equality someday. Just not yet. Meanwhile, those stigmatized by the border must make themselves useful as part of being caught in an interminable liberal democratic meantime; trapped between the atrocities of the past and the unrealized possibilities of democratic futures. That meantime is one where immigrant others are regarded as needing paternalistic civilizational training over time, and stigmatized as having incurred the corresponding debts associated with being recipients of liberal freedom and subjection widely regarded as timeless civilizational gifts. The requisite gratitude demanded to repay such debts is extracted through a lifetime of proper conduct and knowing one’s place—a pastoral power deeply implicated in knowing one’s time. Looking outward, the militarism of sending thousands of soldiers to the border, the jailing of children who literally embody futurity, the separation of families, the incarceration euphemized as “immigrant detention,” and the executive authorization of troops firing on refugees, function at once as high-tech disciplinary media spectacles as well as pungent displays of old-fashioned sovereignty. Taken together, they represent a contemporary concatenation of temporal forces marshalled in the service of reproducing racial hierarchies through a neo-colonial order of segregated time.

It follows from the above that the question of whether immigration is good or bad for democracy itself needs to be questioned with respect to segregated time. Prevailing conceptions of time and the weaponization of dominant temporal vectors are relevant to precisely what democracy and which immigrants are presumed to augur change for the better or worse—and the attendant rationalities undergirding arguments on behalf of each. In the context of a settler colonial nation such as the United States, founded on indigenous genocide and chattel slavery, European immigration has been integral to the formation and upkeep of white-dominated liberal democracy, the perpetual dispossession of First Nations, as well as its historically entrenched exclusions inequalities. Hence much of the country’s tortured history of white democracy and racial capitalism is contiguous with the sitting president’s view of which immigrants are “good” or “bad;” he wants more immigrants from Norway and seeks to ban those from predominantly Muslim countries, Haiti (saying “they all have AIDS”) and from the African destinations he profanely denigrates (the infamous “shithole countries.”)

Partisans of democracy are not well-served by pro-immigrant calls to celebrate diversity that fail to attend to how power inequalities attach to various forms of difference—and how those inequalities are experienced as impositions on human time. For those aspiring to a more robust, even radical incarnations of democracy, much hinges on the possibility of moving away from the notion that citizenship is tantamount to status in general and coextensive with “the human” in particular—as if only those afforded the status of citizenship are eligible to be fully human and treated accordingly. With respect to time and temporality, “eligible” follows a logic that says “Someday we might consider treating you migrants as coeval citizens/human beings, provided we can make your difference useful, or better still, convert it into sameness. Just not yet.” In an era when many are increasingly saying “never” to all foreigners (seldom even bothering to distinguish between immigrants and refugees) we also cannot lose sight of the corresponding uptick in modes of disciplining otherness domestically, ranging from the subtle and covert to outright racial terrorism. Suffice it to say, it is difficult to see how arguments framed in terms of how “we” can best put “those people” to “our” use sufficiently challenges xenophobia and nativist sentiment on behalf of democratic equality. More generally, valorizing immigrants because they do dangerous, low-paying, exploitative work adds ballast to popular shifts toward conceiving citizenship in terms of status and away from forms of citizenship measured otherwise; i.e. relative to civic participation, on the basis of actions as opposed to identity, and so on.

To the extent that immigrant labor is viewed as a hinge on the doorway opening onto a more welcoming disposition to foreigners, the underlying biopolitics of human disposability and segregated time remains largely uncontested. Once immigrant disposability is accepted as both desirable and inevitable, it then becomes a question of whether the attrition and exploitation will be a fast, acute necropolitics, or if it will take the form of attenuated, long-term wasting—or some innovative constellation of both. To the degree past and present are precedent, logics of mnemonic disavowal are available to disappear the temporal dispossession itself, ultimately segregating immigrant disposability from public memory as never having happened in a willfully-amnesiac, self-celebrating “nation of immigrants.” In other words, so long as people across the ideological spectrum agree on the indispensable disposability of immigrants, it really is just a matter of time.