Queer and Trans Migrations

Dynamics of Illegalization, Detention, and Deportation

Eithne Luibheid, Karma R. Chavez, Eithne Luibheid, Karma R. Chavez

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780252052194
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Soziologie

More than a quarter of a million LGBTQ-identified migrants in the United States lack documentation and constantly risk detention and deportation. LGBTQ migrants around the world endure similarly precarious situations. Eithne Luibhéid's and Karma R. Chávez's edited collection provides a first-of-its-kind look at LGBTQ migrants and communities. The academics, activists, and artists in the volume center illegalization, detention, and deportation in national and transnational contexts, and examine how migrants and allies negotiate, resist, refuse, and critique these processes. The works contribute to the fields of gender and sexuality studies, critical race and ethnic studies, borders and migration studies, and decolonial studies.

Bridging voices and works from inside and outside of the academy, and international in scope, Queer and Trans Migrations illuminates new perspectives in the field of queer and trans migration studies.Contributors: Andrew J. Brown, Julio Capó, Jr., Anna Carastathis, Jack Cáraves, Karma R. Chávez, Ryan Conrad, Elif, Katherine Fobear, Monisha Das Gupta, Jamila Hammami, Edward Ou Jin Lee, Leece Lee-Oliver, Eithne Luibhéid, Hana Masri, Yasmin Nair, Bamby Salcedo, Fadi Saleh, Rafael Ramirez Solórzano, José Guadalupe Herrera Soto, Myrto Tsilimpounidi, Suyapa Portillo Villeda, Sasha Wijeyeratne, Ruben Zecena

PART I

Contextualizing

1

“Treated neither with Respect nor with Dignity”

Contextualizing Queer and Trans Migrant “Illegalization,” Detention, and Deportation

EITHNE LUIBHÉID

On April 10, 2014, current and formerly undocumented migrants released recommendations urging President Obama to stop deportations and undo the laws and practices that pipelined as many as 400,000 migrants a year into deportation. This self-described Blue Ribbon Commission, which included LGBTQ-identified members, had come together in response to President Obama’s call to make deportation “more humane” (sic) through a consultative process that included few affected migrants.

A blue ribbon commission is typically comprised of “exceptional people [who are] appointed to investigate, study or analyze a given question.”1 Although members have no direct authority, their participation signals that they are deemed to be among the “best and the brightest,” and that their recommendations may “be used by those with decision-making power to act.”2 The move by undocumented and formerly undocumented migrants to constitute themselves as a Blue Ribbon Commission brilliantly appropriated standard government strategies for addressing important issues. Although immigration law, backed by state violence, constructs undocumented people as neither present nor having political voice, the Blue Ribbon Commission insisted that members’ voices should be heard and recognized as expert, and their recommendations to dismantle the deportation pipeline should be taken seriously.

The release of the Commission’s recommendations reflects struggles and concerns that motivate this collection: questions of migrant “illegalization,” detention, and deportation; the role of self-identified LGBTQ migrants working independently and in coalition with allies, using queer and trans frameworks, in the struggles; and the importance of radical interventions into the current system that funnels people into undocumented status, detention, and deportation in record-breaking, catastrophic numbers.3 This chapter provides history and context for understanding how these struggles affect some one million self-identified LGBTQ migrants in the United States.4 Many U.S. dynamics link with struggles in other nation-states and regions, but it is beyond the scope of this chapter to adequately address those.

This chapter first provides historical context for understanding the development of U.S. immigration controls that seek to reproduce a heteronormative nation and citizenry. The next sections historicize how these controls generate migrants deemed to be “illegal” and subject to detention and deportation. The final section describes how these developments reproduce inequalities among the citizenry while also subordinating migrants; yet, activisms and cultural works by queer and trans migrants and allies have sought to transform these dynamics and create a more just, sustainable world.

Nation-State Immigration Controls

U.S. national level immigration controls began taking shape in the late nineteenth century. The controls operate at the interface between, and shiftingly reproduce, the “transnational” and the “national.” They reproduce the transnational as a site of inequality by treating immigration as primarily generated by individual decision-making, rather than by transnational dynamics and inequalities in which the United States plays a significant role. Immigration controls reproduce the nation and citizenship as sites of inequality, too, by legally admitting migrants who serve white, patriarchal, heterosexual, middle-class norms, while criminalizing, “illegalizing,” and making disposable other migrants. Queer theorists have glossed these intersecting logics as constituting “heteronormativity,” which is the framework that guides this chapter.

A heteronormativity framework underlines the fact that there is a distinction between heterosexuality understood as “object choice” and heteronormativity understood as entailing sexual and gender norms that are inextricable from racial, economic, and colonial logics that structure property relations, resource distribution, public/private distinctions, and the differential valuation of people.5 A heteronormativity framework highlights that all societies are structured according to sexual/gender norms that change across time and place, yet generally normalize sexual reproduction channeled into patriarchal forms that uphold dominant racial/ethnic, economic, and settler/colonial interests. That norm produces a range of sexual and gender subalterns including those who, in contemporary terms, self-identify or are identified by others as LGBTQ—as well as poor and racialized women who bear children, interracial couples, sex workers, genderqueer people, and others.

Immigration controls have served as key technologies for producing a heteronormative U.S. nation and citizenry—and as a locus for challenging these norms. Beginning in the 1880s, nation-state federal-level immigration policies and practices became key instruments for producing and policing changing forms of nationalist heteronormativity.6 Immigration controls took shape in the context of “westward expansion”; ongoing dispossession of Native communities including through the Dawes Act of 1887; efforts to recruit recently freed Black people into state-sanctioned forms of marriage and subordinated labor that upheld white sexual, gender, and property relationships and logics; and a growing overseas empire.7 Early-twentieth-century immigration policies and practices steadily codified dual tracks: one for admission and settlement by primarily migrants from Northern and Western Europe, structured around a heteronuclear family with a male breadwinner;8 and another track that built on the history of exclusion of Chinese and other Asian migrants while making migrants from Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean primarily temporary, exploitable labor that could be summoned when needed and then dismissed. Immigration law also codified growing bans on migrants deemed to threaten these arrangements, including sex workers; those deemed immoral; men who had sexual, erotic, and romantic relationships with other men; women who had sexual, erotic, and romantic relationships with other women; and anarchists, labor organizers, and political dissidents, among others.9 Nayan Shah argues that by policing migrants, the norm of settlement within conjugal, patriarchal, white, propertied marriage became the only legitimate form of political subjectivity in the United States and Canada by the mid–twentieth century.10

The 1965 Hart Cellar Immigration and Nationality Act (1965 INA), which forms the basis for current immigration law, is generally lauded for ending explicitly ethnic and racial discrimination in U.S. immigration law. Yet, historians have shown that the act was deliberately calculated to enable continued racial and ethnic discrimination by elevating nuclear family and sibling ties as the primary grounds for legal admission.11 The Act’s model of family remained grounded in patriarchal marriage comprised by a breadwinning husband, a childbearing wife consigned to the domestic realm, and children. Lest there be any confusion, a ban on migration by “sexual deviates” was codified. Skilled labor remained a basis for legal admission, too, but on a much smaller scale.

By the 1970s, neoliberalism was becoming an ascendant framework that thoroughly depended on, yet denied the relevance of, institutionalized racism, (hetero)sexism, capitalist exploitation, and empire. Tanya Golash-Boza explains that neoliberalism involves:

(1) an ideology that the state’s primary role is to protect property rights, free markets, and free trade; (2) a mode of governance based on a logic of competitiveness, individuality, and entrepreneurship; and (3) a policy package designed to slim down social welfare and integrate countries into the global economy.12

From within this framework, the United States further globalized goods, services, finances, cultural products, and more. It also entered into new rounds of military conflict designed to shore up capitalism. These initiatives interfaced with many long-standing capitalist and colonialist engagements between the United States and other countries, and also created new entanglements. These processes deepened the material, institutional, and ideological ties that comprise the “bridges for migration” to the United States.13 At the same time, the impacts of neoliberalism in other countries, including structural adjustment programs, mobilized increasing numbers of people to migrate internationally. Migrants included Indigenous people throughout the Americas.14 Yet, even as the United States fueled neoliberal globalization processes that significantly contributed to migration, it simultaneously enacted new barriers against people who sought to enter, or remain, legally. These contradictions vastly expanded the numbers of people who would become designated as undocumented and deportable migrants.15

In 1980, the United States codified a distinct institutional and legal process for responding to migrants seeking protection from persecution. Historically, the international refugee system was structured around the experiences of normatively gendered males facing persecution for political activism in the public sphere. In 1965, the United States further defined refugees as those fleeing communism and the Middle East. However, the United States Refugee Act of 1980 incorporated the international definition of a refugee: someone who has crossed an international border and has experienced, or fears experiencing in the future, persecution on account of their race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group.16 The Refugee Act of 1980 also set up processes for selecting and administering the resettlement of people who entered the United States through the refugee system.

Unlike migrants admitted through the 1965 INA, those admitted through the Refugee Act received government assistance (which has steadily declined). Nonetheless, “economic self-sufficiency was the cornerstone of the Refugee Act of 1980,” and resources were administered in a manner that was intended to inculcate neoliberal logics among the migrants.17 The state’s processes for selecting and resettling racializes and (hetero)genders them in ways that condition their possibilities within labor markets, the welfare state, and citizenship norms.18

In the early 1990s, after tireless efforts by feminist, queer, and other activists and scholars, U.S. law began to recognize that sexuality or gender could comprise a basis for social group identity or a tool of persecution on which refugee or asylum claims could be made. Yet, this insight became incorporated into refugee/asylum law and policy in a way that largely reflected the neoliberal multicultural politics of recognition, which essentialized sexuality and gender as individual attributes of marginalized people rather than as broad social axes of power and struggle that are relevant to everyone. This approach created numerous barriers for migrants who sought asylum on the basis of sexual or gender identity or persecution. For example, successful claims hinge on credibility, which is often evaluated according to deeply ethnocentric and essentialist norms or stereotypes about LGBTQ people or cisgender heterosexual women’s lives, which are unable to account for intersecting vulnerabilities that include but extend beyond sexuality and gender. The process often reproduces colonialist logics of “third world difference,” “backwardness,” and LGBTQ people and wom...