Notes on immigration and the politics of exclusion

What is most troubling about the treatment of immigrants is not just the closing of borders, the targeting for marginal status and surveillance and harassment of selective groups among residents, or the reactionary nationalisms that have gone with this, but also the politicization of conditions of national belonging. I was told by a hospital psychiatrist in 2013 that I was not acting "American." He implored me in a parody of encouragement to "be American with me." He surely knew there was no answer to this question or way to comply; it is nonsense, and he was looking for an excuse.

In democracies, "the people" are theoretically sovereign and the government is supposed to represent and serve them. So how do we get to a situation where governments (and perhaps majorities that they appear to represent) choose their people? Is the nation like a God that people are supposed to obey?

Of course, one thing is hopeful about the United States in this respect: historically. we do not have an ethnicity proper to citizenship that most of us share. Neither citizenship nor rights normally due citizens should normally be conditioned on possession of any attribute or belonging to any demographical category or type of persons. It is bad enough that our vaunted demographical tolerance is often overwhelmed by our profound moral intolerances. Trump does not like the victims of global inequality and war, but they built much of this country. It can be improved, or just guarded.

(There are certainly forms of social power that work by inclusion more than exclusion. and perhaps by encouragements rather than interdictions and punishments, as the work of contemporary German philosopher and social theorist Byung-Chul Han has suggested. If the new forms are subtler, the older ones are crueler, and after a long period of the pseudo-liberalism and softer power that emerged after the 60s, we seem to be witnessing reversions to them, as nations worry about how to cope with globalism when it has meant that capital travels easily and laboring and suffering bodies problematically, as they are both needed and not needed, presenting both opportunities and risk or liabilities. The causes and degrees of risk or suffering faced by migrating bodies may be treated as their own. The Central American migration crisis is largely the result of US policy going back to the late 70s, but it is very American to desire an absolute liberty for those with property or power, together with a freedom from obligations. Just as in this country class status often determines whether and how this kind of attitude is considered a, usually moral, problem. Morality is the set of obligations of have-nots to bosses who may employ or otherwise manage them).