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Illegality at Work: Deportability and the Productive New Era of Immigration Enforcement
Author(s) -
Harrison Jill Lindsey,
Lloyd Sarah E.
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
antipode
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.177
H-Index - 98
eISSN - 1467-8330
pISSN - 0066-4812
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-8330.2010.00841.x
Subject(s) - legitimacy , immigration , enforcement , work (physics) , state (computer science) , ethnography , politics , capital (architecture) , ideal (ethics) , affect (linguistics) , migrant workers , political science , political economy , sociology , business , public relations , economic growth , economics , law , geography , engineering , mechanical engineering , archaeology , communication , algorithm , computer science , anthropology
Our goal in this paper is to identify how recent escalations in immigration enforcement and changes in migration practices affect the ability of the state to continue to serve two of its key “productive” functions: protecting capital accumulation within industry and ensuring the state's own political legitimacy in the eyes of the public. We draw on our ethnographic research on Latino migrant dairy farm workers in Wisconsin to examine the ways in which a group of migrant workers experiences the process of being enforced as “illegal” bodies. We find that migrant dairy workers’ palpable sense of “deportability” articulates with the specific structure of dairy work in ways that make the economically and politically “ideal” migrant: compliant at work and invisible otherwise.