Sociology Lens最新文献

This article uses the concept of holes rather than borders to articulate the space that US immigration policing engenders. In contradistinction to borders—lines or zones that can be mapped, walled, or policed to delimit sovereign bodies—holes are strategic exceptions to mappable sovereignties. Rather than fixed, mappable boundaries, holes are mutable and in flux, thriving on the shifting potential to appear or disappear and to make people disappear as legal subjects. If US immigration policing operates, to a large extent, through holes distributed across borders and long-distance spaces, then any mapping of this power that centers national borders or bounded nation-states alone is insufficient. I show how the policing of Venezuelan migration centers the distribution of holes from South and Central America to spaces within the US that are far from “the border.” Against a discursive focus on “the border” and the border wall in US rhetoric on immigration, I argue that the actual practices of impeding flows of immigration or channeling them through spaces of death have increasingly operated through holey space. If holy space has been defined in studies of religion as a sacred space set apart from mundane rules, then the hol(e)y spaces of immigration are set apart from fixed conceptions of “the rule of law.” A focus on holes shows how the legal order of immigration depends more on exceptions, personalized or arbitrary power, and the instability of interim extra-legal executive orders than a dichotomy of legal/illegal. Despite their necropolitical power, holes do not create an entirely striated, hierarchical space. Holes are also rings of connection and passageways, highlighting the creativity and agency of asylum seekers in forging dignity under extremely difficult conditions.

In his essay Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren John Maynard Keynes delineates an economic utopia where most work is done with the aid of technology. In contrast to pessimistic views associated with the term ‘technological unemployment’ today, Keynes offers an optimistic vision for work societies where technology facilitates more freedom from paid work. Keynes also envisaged a softening of the capitalist work ethic and achievement principle. Today, however, technologically inflicted unemployment is perceived as a threat where gainful employment as a cost and meaningful activity is reduced while profits are maximized. Simultaneously, moral pressures to be employed, self-sufficient and to contribute to society have solidified. Inspired by Keynes' vision, it is argued that the origins of our economically and politically precarious times lie in a ‘de-politicization of work’. What Keynes perceives as economic possibilities needs to be complemented with political possibilities which otherwise turn into economic and political precarities.

In 2011, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officially launched its online locator system, an internet-based public tool designed to assist attorneys, family members, and interested entities in locating detained individuals in ICE custody. In November 2019, Freedom For Immigrants (FFI), an immigrant rights organization, conducted surveys of individuals and organizations attempting to locate detainees and found 698 instances of migrants disappearing from the online locator system, with the search stating “zero matching records.” With this in mind, this essay explores technologies of invisibility of the carceral web through ethnographic observation and testimonies collected in immigration detention. I use the term “carceral web” by Susila Gurusami to refer to the spatial intersection between carceral institutions and digital technologies that unveil the entanglements and workings of the carceral edgelands. I argue that the ICE locator system, a public tool for migrant identification and placement, not only showcases state-enforced disappearance but reveals a process of invisibilization and structural violence temporally and spatially at work.