Posts Tagged ‘discourse’

‘Anti-Illegal Immigration’ is a euphemism for Anti-Immigrant

// July 16th, 2009 // 5 Comments » // Immigration, Moron of the Week

“So if the government designates a term [alien] for a group of people, I don’t see what makes it pejorative…”
-NumbersUSA

Uh-huh, similarly, when the state labels people as ‘Gooks’ and ‘Niggers,’ there is absolutely no pejorative.

NumbersUSA also cringes at the phrase ‘illegal immigrant’ because they consider it an oxymoron. An ‘immigrant’ refers to ONLY a legal permanent resident, hence the term immigrant cannot be ‘illegal.’ That’s quite a leap from any English dictionary definition. I wonder what they call someone who came here legally, filed all the correct paperwork and then ‘aged out.’ Accidentally-illegal immigrant?

The Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) broadly defines an immigrant as any alien in the United States, except one legally admitted under specific nonimmigrant categories (INA section 101(a)(15)). Legal or illegal entry/presence does not make one less of an ‘immigrant’ under the law.

As for using the word ‘alien’:

“Alien” is a legal term defined in the Immigration and Nationality Act and used in immigration court and Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) decisions day in and day out. “Illegal alien” and “illegal immigrant” are not.

Needless to say, this roundtable conversation was disgusting and devoid of intellect and the ethnic media groups were equally as clueless.

Differentiating that someone is against ‘illegal immigration’ and not legal immigration belies and ignores a broken system of immigration that:
1. Disallows people from immigrating legally even when they want to
2. Renders and labels human beings as ‘illegal’

You still insist that you want unauthorized migrants to do things legally? Recognize that the system makes that impossible in many cases, and that it takes a certain amount of economic privilege to get all the immigration paperwork right. And even then, U.S. citizen children are fighting to keep their parents here and U.S. citizen parents are being separated from their ‘aged-out’ children. Realize that harsh economic realities such as NAFTA have pitted business above labor and devastated conditions in Mexico to the point that migration is the only resort.

If right-wing anti-immigrant groups were really against only ‘illegal immigration,’ they would be doing everything in their power to fix the broken legal immigration system so people would not be forced to either immigrate illegally or worse, ‘fall out of line.’

And referencing this great post by Dave again – ‘Illegal alien’ and ‘illegal immigrant’ are the real euphemisms.

The Perversion of Tolerance – I Don’t want to be ‘Tolerated’ and neither should you

// November 14th, 2008 // 5 Comments » // All things LGBT, Desi-Indian, Immigration, Political Theory, Racism

Tolerance is intolerant and demands assimilation.
—Herman Broch, cited in the Jewish Museum, Vienna, Austria

Conversely, what is proclaimed and practiced as tolerance today, is in many of its most effective manifestations serving the cause of oppression.

-Herbert Marcuse

The mainstream, alternative press and bloggers are so inundated and knee-deep in the discourse of tolerance that hardly anyone has stopped to analyze the etymology and meaning of tolerance and its implications for society.

Tracy Hickman laments in The San Francisco Chronicle:

How ironic that the same people who call for tolerance of diverse lifestyles are perpetrating aggression against others for standing up for their beliefs and voting for the principles they hold dear?

Gary Bauer whines about “The Intolerance of the Same Sex Movement” (See also Lone Star Times, WorldNetDaily) while John Kass expresses disappointment at the lack of tolerance shown to T-shirts with political slogans.

Religious forces such as the LDS and Catholic Church take pleasure in pointing out the random and isolated attacks on churches, defacing of anti-gay yard signs, while right-wingers like Matt Barber are slamming the opponents of H8 for taking to the streets and not respecting the “rule of law” and democracy.

Even on the pro-migrant side, bloggers and organizations call for greater ‘tolerance’ as a response to the hate-crime against Latinos such as Marcello Lucero. The history of immigration discourse is ripe with tolerance discourse on all sides — tolerance for new immigrants, intolerance for ‘illegal immigrants’ and so on. Blacks, Latinos, Asians, religious minorities, gays and lesbians are all “tolerated” groups.

I have quietly sat on the side-lines for months, silently ‘tolerating’ the calls for tolerance. Enough.

I don’t want to be tolerated and neither should you. The discourse of tolerance–a noble and grandiose liberal experiment–must be stripped naked and exposed for what it really is: a colonizing discursive tool with the power to label and reproduce our identities, thereby designating minorities as permanent Others in civil society and globality, and justifying their ‘civilizing.’

(more…)

Wall Street Collapse? Another Crisis of Capitalism

// September 25th, 2008 // 3 Comments » // Discourse Studies, Political Theory, Politics

I wish I had the ability to be shocked when I hear about a ‘deep crisis’ that can cause staggering losses (a cyclical crisis of capitalism), a $700 billion bailout for private sector cronies and John McCain canceling a 2-3 hour debate appearance as a publicity stunt to resolve this crisis (as if, his presence would make a difference. Admittedly, he has a weak economic understanding). But I digress.

It’s not like a major financial crisis was unexpected in the near future. Political economists have been making predictions about the fall of the U.S. dollar for quite some time; this Wall Street financial collapse is just a start. Oil prices are dropping, Asian markets are coming down even immigration is down (ALIPAC must be happy; they are happily blaming immigrants for the meltdown too). Actually forget the contemporary political economists and politicians trying to pinpoint the source of this crisis; revisit the blog favorite Karl Marx, who held that the internal contradictions within capitalism as a system would create cycles of boom and slump, that over time would become more untenable as social forces opposing it built up, eventually leading to an overthrow of the system. What are these internal contradictions?

1. The tendency of the rate of profit to fall

2. The concentration of capital

3. Rise in unemployment

4. Overproduction or Underconsumption (crisis of realization)

5. Collapse of credit

6. Bigger firms buying out smaller and weaker firms (in this case, the government bailing out)

7. Crisis ’solved’ till the next inevitable cycle

Do these predictions of more than 150 years ago sound familiar?
(more…)

The flawed logic of either/or – Creating spaces for intervention

// June 7th, 2008 // 2 Comments » // Discourse Studies

black/white, straight/gay, women/men, left/right, us/them, American/Un-American, nativist/humanist, legal/illegal, liberal/conservative anti-corporate/anti-labor, capitalism/communist, butch/femme, inside/outside, developed/undeveloped, top/bottom, public/private…

Our world is tainted in simplistic, dualistic undertones since we are young and we grow up conditioned to think in this manner. It starts from the household where pink is for girls and blue is for boys going all the way to the President where you are either with him or against him and there is no middle ground, no space to negotiate and intervene.

This blog is a reflection of my personal and political philosophy. I am not concerned with whether anyone subscribes to it or not; for me, it is about building a space without the pervasive duality and dichotomy of everyday discourses. And if that space is only occupied by the presence of few, that is fine with me as well. The point is to make ruptures and disruptions in these hegemonic continuous, cyclical modes of thinking.

The intellectual work that tested my limits was Saba Mahmood’s Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject.

Saba Mahmood rejects secular liberal feminist theory and practices that cast religion (in this case, Islam), as opposed to the interests of women. Through her particular field study of the grassroots women’s piety movements in the mosques of Cairo between 1995 and 1997, Mahmood aims to provide a stark contrast to the often secular liberal depictions of women’s movements. In doing so, she questions the age-old ethnocentric notions of secular liberal feminism that requires feminism and women’s movements to be framed as opposed to structures of patriarchy and power i.e. religion and going a step further, the nation-state project. Mahmood does away with these notions of ethical norms, agency and freedom, thereby posing conceptual problems for secular feminists who would otherwise continue to push for the liberation of women from Islam and actual structures of power in order to achieve their warped-up notions of liberal emancipation of women.

I wrestled for days with this book. Essentially Mahmood was saying that feminism and being political need not denote the emancipation of women from patriarchal structures like religion and the nation-state. Women do not have to completely reject structures of power to actually carve a space and voice for themselves, and thereby work towards transforming it as the women in the piety movement carved spaces for themselves within a traditionally male sphere. I finally realized that juxtaposing Mahmood’s text with secular liberal feminism need not mean that I had to choose or submit to one. I did not and neither do you. Sometimes the questions are more enlightening than the answers to them.

So when I read comments like “how can you be anti-corporate and still pro-exploitation of cheap labor from the Third World?” it is immediately marked as spam. Maybe I should take the time to respond, to expose conditioned minds to different ways of thinking about issues, to bury the either/or in an intellectual manner. Then again, the title of the blog should be clue enough — I do not do either/or and will not submit to that discourse.

You do not need to choose between being pro-amnesty and pro-American. You need not choose between an “illegal alien” and a U.S. citizen. And you definitely do not have to be pro-migrant or anti-migrant. Focus on the becoming, not the being.

When I speak about bridges, I am referring to a metaphor for fluidity, change, channeling, multiple levels of positioning that culminate into a meeting point. I am not speak of ONE compromise or middle point–I am comfortable with no resolutions. Call it folly or postmodern emancipation. I am comfortable in-limbo; after all, that is my conditioning, no?

I realize I am flawed — There are certain categories I hold dear that I did not choose for myself. At times my patience is tested and I do slip up with the anti-_______. And I will not offer love or compassion to those who hate me because of some category, label, classification, documentation, physical feature, or preference. No, I am not a Gandhi or MLK and do not wish to go down that path. It is a tit for tat when it comes to me. But I will agree to disagree heartedly.

Marking The Anniversary of ‘Illegal Immigration’

// May 7th, 2008 // No Comments » // Human Rights, Immigration, Racism

May 6, 1882 is the date for the birth of ‘illegal immigration.’ Like most social concerns that are only deemed as a ‘problem’ when it benefits the state, the immigration of Chinese laborers to the United States, the so-called ‘yellow peril’ and ‘Asian invasion’ now required ‘documentation.’ The Chinese were constructed as unassimilable peoples, not eligible for citizenship under the Chinese Exclusion Act of  1882. The Act also restricted Chinese immigration by excluding Chinese laborers from entering the country for the next 10 years under penalty of deportation and imprisonment. This would pave the way for more codes and statutes restricting Chinese immigration:

S 6 (22 Stat. 58, . 120), provides that every Chinese person other than a laborer, who may be entitled to come within the United States, shall produce a prescribed certificate of his identity and of his right to enter: and Act July 5, 1884, provides that this certificate “shall be the sole evidence
permissible on the part of the person so producing the same to establish a right of entry into the United States.” Act Oct. 1. 18X8. prohibits any Chinese laborer who had been, or was then, or might hereafter be, a resident within the United States, and who had departed or might depart therefrom, to return to or remain in the United States. Held, that since the passage of the latter act no Chinese person, formerly resident in the United States but temporarily absent
therefrom, is entitled to return without the
prescribed certificate.—Wan Shing v. United
State», 140 U. S. 424. 11 S. Ct. 729, 35 L. Ed. 03.

What led to the enacted of Chinese exclusion? Was it working class fears of Chinese immigrants taking their jobs (as is the excuse given today) or simply sheer racism that the anti-illegal immigrant lobby denies in contemporary times?

The Act was approved by Congress on May 6, and signed into law by the President on May 8. The headline in the Inter Ocean read “China Cornered: President Arthur Signs the Bill for Restricting Mongolian Immigration” (Inter Ocean, May 9 1882, page 2, vol. XI, iss. 36). A month earlier, President Arthur had vetoed a similar bill since he was afraid of retaliation from the Qing government of China but newspapers were full of headlines such as “The Mongol Wins” (San Francisco Bulletin, April 6 1882) and “The Victory of the Chinophiles” (San Francisco Bulletin, April 5 1882). Wading through old newspaper archives from this time, I caught hold of several interesting pieces that centered around justifying the exclusion of Chinese from citizenship.

Amid protests against President Arthur, including burning his effigy, a committee meeting was held by Republicans where the President was addressed:

“…unlike our people in form and feature, in habit and character, informed in the rites of a pagan religion, and disciplined under a cruel code by a despotic Government, they are not qualified for the exercise of the rights or duties of American citizens…and from their tenacity and inflexibility of nature, we believe they never can become loyal citizens of the United States.”

The address went on to claim the invasion of Chinese laborers and the threat they posed to every interest and class of society. At the same time, efforts were underway to differentiate Chinese immigration from European immigration in order to justify the exclusion. San Francisco Bulletin ran a story on “True and False Immigration” with the basic premise that the Chinese laborer is not a ‘true immigrant’ since this immigration is characterized by uneven number of sexes; it is rather an invasion, the article concluded (April 21, 1882).

The Chinese Exclusion Act was abolished in 1943 but the concept of ‘documenting’ the foreign Other was underway and ‘illegal immigration’ or undocumented immigration was born and the after-effects continue to reverberate in contemporary immigration control policy.

(You can access old newspaper archives via your university library Newsbank or Proquest database).

Tackling the anti-DREAM Act rhetoric

// March 8th, 2008 // No Comments » // Immigration

Most of the online news articles referring to the DREAM Act and undocumented students are marked with anti-illegal immigration comments ranging from "illegal is illegal" to "they are criminals, deport their a$$es" to "send them back home with their parents."

However ignorant and uninformed the comments, we cannot ignore that the opposition is organized. A fellow DREAM Act friend of mine suggested that it was time we took on the task of developing answers to their comment spam. Answers with facts, answers that are coherent and intelligent, and answers that are mass-distributed. This involves a careful survey of what people say about us and the DREAM Act,  dissecting each argument, and noting several counterpoints to each point.

Are we going to change minds? Maybe, we can change minds by providing correct information for those who are ambivalent and uninformed, but not the ignorant masses who insist and see undocumented students as the enemy. And that is the real problem — we are the new scapegoats; too many people fighting over the small piece of pie are being pushed to believe that if we got rid of all "illegals," their problems would miraculously disappear. I have seen blog posts with doubtful statistics about how illegal immigrants are more expensive than the war in Iraq. That is utterly preposterous, and yet, we cannot let such myths escalate into grand truths.

What we can achieve through this little project is an organized front to thwart attacks on our DREAMs and aspirations, our character, sincerity and hard-work, and our commitment to this country. Silence is consent, and letting ignorant spammers continue to bask in the oblivion of their ignorance is no longer an option.

Noam Chomsky – Reference

// January 6th, 2008 // No Comments » // Anti-Capitalism, Discourse Studies, Ebooks, Political Theory, Politics

The following is a list of books and resources that I find interesting and referencing here for educational, non-commercial purposes.

Noam Chomsky -

And so, national security is diametrically opposed to human security

// November 19th, 2007 // No Comments » // Discourse Studies, Nationalism, Politics

Lets see. Critical Security Studies has been a prime interest since I was 16 years old and running the Terror Talk/Threat Construction Kritik at policy debate tournaments. I won rounds solely on the basis of this — I remember my debate coach once remarked that I never ever used “the threat of Islamic terrorists” or any such discourse to win any rounds no matter what. It may have cost me on several occasions but that is all in the past. I graduated and let the Threat Con file sit and gather dust for 3 years until I finally used it as a final paper for my Undergrad. This is possible Doctorate level work that I am not keen on pursuing at this point for obvious reasons. It reminds me that I am too smart and intellectual for law school. I also tend to think it is a DUH. Can you believe someone won the Nobel prize for writing that poverty and terrorism were related? Goodness, that’s just common sense and I have been writing that since I was 15! Where is my Nobel prize yo?! Actually you keep the Nobel Prize, just hand me a Green card, will you?! :)

Anyway, excerpts are in order. Whole paper is here

“The discursive speech acts embodied in various National Security Strategy documents establish that the act of securing the American people has given way to the politicization of national security. Politicization refers to the employment of national security discourse for political ends and not specifically for meeting the actual security needs of civil society. Starting with President Truman’s NSC-68 document in 1950 and continuing up to Bush II in the present day, the discourse of national security strategy has been systematically cemented on the national policy agenda, employed for purposes other than the security of the American people. Upon a thorough examination of these documents, a central theme that emerges and dictates United States foreign policy is the pervasive construction of an enemy, an external “Other” as a threat to national security. I argue that this security discourse functions as a tool for identity construction and reification of the American state apparatus with far-reaching consequences: an increasing politicization of security, legitimization of a permanent war economy, the oppression and marginalization of minority groups, omission of key security issues from the security agenda, and paradoxically, a more insecure, unstable America and global order. Therefore, the goal of this paper is to deconstruct the totalizing and unitary narrative of the National Security Strategy documents under Truman, Bush I, Clinton and Bush II, and unearth counter-narratives that challenge dominant security discourses based on ideological threat construction. I conclude that the main objectives set out in NSC-68 continue to govern US foreign policy even in the post-Cold War era, that American foreign policy today mirrors American foreign policy post-World War II: a search for identity and power, which ironically leads to more insecurity for Americans and for the entire world.”

« Older Entries