Week 7 - Alex Nguyen - A03

The article by Ackerman and Furman highlights a distinct issue in the conceptualization of immigration in the United States: the fact that it can be criminalized, and deemed “illegal”. Furthermore, they elaborate on the privatization of prisons, which fundamentally corrupts law enforcement in the United States. Since incarceration lines pockets, it’s easy to understand why officers are constantly ready to arrest people, and target specific groups of people as “easy pickings”. Such is the face of neoliberalism — the free reign of discrimination and hate crimes enacted by privileged people under the guise of freedom of the markets. Americans, particularly those who don’t face oppression or suppression, are led to believe that the free market is what will allow them, too, to have a chance at becoming billionaires. That is, after all, the American Dream. This fallacy lures people into supporting a system that ultimately feeds off of them, while defending it by supporting hate for those deemed less desirable by the state.

The history of privatized incarceration and the illegalization of immigration is deeply mired in racial and ethnic discrimination. Michelle Alexander in her book The New Jim Crow explains how prisons became privatized as a means to support the South after the abolition of slavery. As there became an apparent dearth in free, black labor, prisons grew into corporations, selling the labor of its inmates to mines and other such undesirable occupations, which saw horrible conditions and many deaths of its unpaid workers — i.e., slaves. African Americans lost the slave stereotype of being simple-minded, docile, and easily led to work, and began to be seen as violent criminals. The same sort of stereotyping is being used to justify the inhumane treatment of immigrants — separating children and infants from their families, putting them in prison-like detention centers with hardly even base living conditions — these are not conditions to be put upon people you deem equal to you as human beings.

The crackdown on immigration has also had a growing history. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Immigration Act of 1924 were two of the first laws regarding immigration, and specifically targeted ethnic demographics. These laws officialized the concept of the “illegal immigrant” and put deportation into mass use. While the Chinese were wanted in the mid-19th century for their cheap labor on the transcontinental railroad, the white U.S. government did not want them as citizens, and they quickly acquired criminal reputations, spurring on the myth of the Yellow Peril. Illegal immigration is not a natural thing, nor is it an inevitable byproduct of having borders. Its very roots are steeped in racial discrimination.

How can we support our undocumented population?

Alissa ​R​. ​Ackerman​​ and ​Rich ​Furman. “​The ​Criminalization ​of ​Immigration ​and ​the ​Privatization of ​the ​Immigration ​Detention​: ​Implications ​for ​Justice.”
Alexander, M. [TEDx Talks]. (2013, October 16). The future of race in America: Michelle Alexander at TEDxColumbus [Video File]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQ6H-Mz6hgw
Uncle Sam Kicks out the Chinaman. 31 Dec. 1885, upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/38/Coolieusa.jpg. Accessed 17 Feb. 2019.