An Ambivalent Magic: Undocumented Asian Immigrants and Racialized “Illegality” in the U.S. Imperial Project

ABSTRACT In this paper, I argue that the Cold War’s militarized and imperialist logic has entangled with racialized migrant “illegality” to shape undocumented Korean immigrants’ (in)voluntary enlistment in the MAVNI program. Drawing on several years of ethnographic research, I examine how young undocumented Koreans were mobilized in service of the US’s imperial project to sustain its global supremacy through the “War on Terror.” In particular, I attend to the way militarized imperialism embedded within U.S. citizenship becomes intimately tied to the transnational ideologies of South Korean militarized citizenship as experienced by the unprivileged descendants of the unending Cold War. The neoliberal practices of the DREAM Act and DACA only reinforced this connection. Focusing on the undocumented-to-military trajectory, this study contributes to interrogate the temporality of the racialized migrant “illegality” of Asian immigrants within the larger historical context of U.S. militarized imperialism in Asia during the unending Cold War.