Scales of foreignness: US immigration law as a geographic and constitutional abnormality

Keywords: Immigration Law, Legal Geography, Biopolitics, Geopolitics, Territory
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Monday
Session Start / End Time: 2/28/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/28/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 68

Abstract

With this paper, I will propose a legal-geographic analysis of US immigration law to highlight the biopolitical and geopolitical principles that underpin it. Immigration law may be conceptualized as an abnormal area of law, which functions by producing lives and spaces that may be governed as foreign, and thus, outside the normal constitutional rules despite their domestic presence. In this sense, the law produces extraterritorial and extra-constitutional spaces in the country’s interior, and it complicates the distinction between foreign and domestic territory, and thus, constitutional and extra-constitutional lives. It does so by identifying human lives outside the United States as governable outside the Constitution, and it subsequently reverses this principle by governing foreign lives inside as if they had never left their previous locations. These lives and their spaces are classified according to the degree of extraterritoriality that they are assigned, which are enshrined in their immigration statuses.
This peculiar, ultranationalist structure operates at the conjunction of biopolitics and geopolitics, in the sense that it classifies lives based on the mutual interaction between their spaces and the status that they are assigned. Thus, there is no separation between a life and the space that it occupies, because the legal status of said life is always dependent on the interaction between the two. This results in the production of abnormal subjects who inhabit a territory that is neither foreign nor domestic.