Biopolitics K

1nc
The reduction of restrictions on legal immigration reduces the particularity of human
experience to biopolitical categories of management and consumption. Read the
affirmative as an instrumental gesture about what life is worth being lived in the
United States. Violence and abandonment underwrite the normative force of the
affirmative speech act—sovereign violence manifested as border patrol is the
foundation for the moral force behind the admittance of deserving migrants.
Zylinska, Referee for the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada,
2014 (Joanna, “The universal acts, Judith Butler and the biopolitics of immigration,” Cultural Studies
18.4, GDI JM)

In his own reading of Antigone in the context of hospitality towards the alien and the foreign, Jacques
Derrida justifies referring to classical figures in the context of contemporary political matters by arguing
that these ‘urgent contemporary matters’ ‘do not only bring the classical structures into the present.
They interest us and we take a look at them at the points where they seem, as though of themselves, to
deconstruct these inheritances or the prevailing interpretations of these inheritances’ (2000, p. 139).
Derrida does not of course suggest abandoning these classical structures altogether once they have
been placed ‘in deconstruction’, but rather thinking them differently, or allowing them to reveal, ‘as
though of themselves’, certain ambiguities inherent in them, ambiguities that will in turn allow us to
interpret and enact our current democratic laws in a new way. To give an example of such an enactment
of the Greek democratic tradition in our twenty-first century polis, I want to look at another borderline
character in Sophocles’s Antigone (2000): the figure of Tiresias. The blind prophet Tiresias seems to have
returned to the British state in the figure of UK Home Secretary, David Blunkett, proponent of the new
immigration regime and author of the White Paper, ‘Secure Borders, Safe Haven: Integration with
Diversity in Modern Britain’ (February 2002), a document that paved the way for the subsequent
Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act. What is it that links Tiresias with Blunkett, apart from their
physical blindness? In Sophocles’ play, Tiresias appears before Creon to warn him that Thebes is on the
‘edge of peril’ and that Creon should ‘listen to the voice of reason’ and withdraw his prohibition against
the burial of Antigone’s brother, Polynices. On hearing Creon’s refusal to open the city gates, Tiresias
accuses Creon of suffering from ‘the disease of wealth’ and predicts the impending wrath of gods that
will descend upon Creon and his family. The figure of Tiresias as a blind seer on the border of the polis is
particularly relevant for me in the context of current legislation regarding asylum and immigration in
Western democracies. However, one might perhaps say that it is too facile a gesture to ‘equate’ a
modern Western politician with an ancient prophet of doom and gloom on the basis of their shared
‘disability’, or even that it is inappropriate to draw attention to Blunkett’s actual blindness. Aware of
such possible reservations, I am nevertheless prepared to risk accusations of impropriety and pursue the
Tiresian (dis)inheritance, and its accompanying blind spots, in the discourse on immigration and asylum
as developed in the UK government’s White Paper, ‘Secure Borders, Safe Haven’.5 ‘Secure Borders, Safe
Haven’ opens with a foreword, which has been authored and signed by the Home Secretary himself.
Blunkett adopts here a somewhat paternalistic, sermon-like tone to explain to the British public that
‘There is nothing more controversial, and yet more natural, than men and women from across the
world seeking a better life for themselves and their families’.6 In his apparent attempt to win over
‘the British public’, he establishes a sequence of (il)logical equivalences (e.g. between a ‘natural’ desire
for migration and a ‘natural’ feeling of apprehension felt by those whose territory the migrants enter)
that are supposed to embrace and convey how ‘the nation’ feels about the issue of immigration. In a
tone reminiscent of the Greek prophet, Blunkett speaks about the need to offer ‘a safe haven’ to ‘those
arriving on our often wet and windy shores’. Just as Tiresias takes it upon himself to point out that Creon
speaks unwisely, the Home Secretary addresses and unravels the anxieties of all those self-appointed
guardians of the national shores (from editors of tabloid newspapers to ‘my home is my castle’ John
Bulls) who want to turn Britain into a fortress. Blunkett’s discussion of the problems connected with
migration and asylum is supposed to rebuke accusations that Britain is out of line with other European
nations in the way in which it deals with illegal immigration and asylum seekers, and that ‘people
coming through the Channel Tunnel, or crossing in container lorries, constitutes an invasion’. Blunkett’s
Foreword is thus aimed ‘against false perception’, which he attempts to overcome with ‘clarity’ and
reason. Blunkett lays out his argument carefully, indicating errors in the public perception and correcting
them with his own argument. But it is not only the correction of errors that interests the Home
Secretary. Blunkett’s primary aim is the development of an immigration and asylum policy that ‘looks
forward’. As if repeating the instruction given to Creon by Triesias, Blunkett warns the people not to act
unwisely; he explains carefully that migration brings significant benefits and that it can advance the
prosperity of the nation, provided it is properly managed. This last reservation makes Blunkett a thrifty
prophet, resorting to the discourse of economics and management to explain his vision. As we know
from Foucault, the biopolitics of modern democracies works precisely through ‘the administration of
bodies and the calculated management of life’ (1984, p. 140). As if to illustrate this, it is by means of
proposing ‘rational controlled routes’ of immigration (rather than ‘the international ‘‘free for all’’, the so
called ‘‘asylum shopping’’ throughout Europe, and the ‘‘it is not our problem’’ attitude which is too often
displayed’) that Blunkett hopes to promote his policy. However, the calculated rationality of his outlook
seems permanently threatened by the irrational - coming not only from the opponents of his policy but
also from the author of the White Paper himself. After laying out his proposal for a ‘rational’ and
‘controlled’ economic migration and asylum system, Blunkett adds: ‘It is possible to square the circle’.
At this instant the voice of reason founders, and immigration policy reveals that it is only a very rough
sketch, one that allows the draughtsman to resort to illicit geometrical moves in order to complete the
picture. Indeed, Blunkett’s prophetic vision for Britain as a ‘safe haven’ depends on a number of
exclusions firmly in place. First, the Home Secretary affirms that this new vision will only work if we
are ‘secure within our sense of belonging and identity’. Significantly, Butler makes it clear that ‘This
exclusionary matrix by which subjects are formed thus requires a simultaneous production of a
domain of abject beings, those who are not yet ‘‘subjects’’, but who form the constitutive outside to
the domain of the subject’ (1993, p. 3). At best a utopian fantasy of homeliness, at worst a conscious
foreclosure of ethics of openness to the alterity of the other -/ an alterity that always poses a
challenge to our own security and self-knowledge -/ Blunkett’s politics of migration therefore seems
premised on a logical impossibility.7 It is a hospitality that is in fact based on the originary closure, on
foreseeing the foreign threat and trying to avert it. This is the moment when the classical heritage gives
way to bizarre miscegenation. Blunkett-Tiresias stops instructing Creon to actually become Creon: a
protector of the public sphere whose law both produces and excludes the unlawful, those without the
integrity and belonging shared by the members of the polis. For it is this when he goes on to announce:
‘We have fundamental moral obligations which we will always honour’, only to counterbalance this
claim with the following reservation: ‘At the same time, those coming into our country have duties
that they need to understand and which facilitate their acceptance and integration’. His paradoxical
immigration policy of ‘squaring the circle’ is also described as ‘a ‘‘two-way street’’ requiring
commitment and action from the host community, asylum seekers and long-term migrants alike’. It is
perhaps not surprising (which does not mean it is intentional on Blunkett’s part) that a linguistic
paradox is used when outlining our moral obligations and their duties, since the asylum seekers’
position ‘before the law’ itself entails a paradox: even though they are outside it, they are supposedly
subject to its power. Constituted as threshold political beings, migrants and ‘asylum seekers’ are
defined precisely through their liminal status that places them on the outskirts of the community. Then
how can they be expected to ‘have duties’ imposed on them by the host community and manifest
commitment to these duties if this very community needs a prior definition of itself, a definition that
confirms identity and belonging in relation, or even opposition, to what might threaten it? We also need
to consider how the political status of asylum seekers and migrants is actually established. Who
legislates the duties that they will be expected to follow? What is the source of the moral obligation that
will help Britons ‘manage’ the asylum issue? Agamben explains that ‘The sovereign decides not the licit
and the illicit but the originary inclusion of the living in the sphere of law’ (1998, p. 26).8 To what
extent, then, is the sovereign entitled to impose the law on those whose identity he defines as being
situated ‘before’ the law, both in the spatial and temporal sense? In particular, given that Iraqis
constitute the majority of all asylum seekers in the UK, is this conditional openness in the context of the
‘Gulf War II’, not a certain blind spot in the rhetoric and politics of the sovereign government that does
not see a connection between the Iraqi refugees from their own country, whose lives are threatened by
Western bombs, and the Iraqi asylum seekers trying to come into Britain? This form of politics, with its
underlying moral obligations, seems to be based on a certain occluded but inevitable and thus
constitutive violence, where ‘the sovereign is the point of indistinction between violence and law, the
threshold on which violence passes over into law and law passes into violence’ (Agamben 1998, p. 32).
Indeed, even the very process of naming an Iraqi, Albanian or Kurdish refugee an ‘asylum seeker’,
towards whom the hospitality of the host nation is to be extended, is inevitably violent. Butler
explains that ‘The naming is at once the setting of a boundary, and also the repeated inculcation of a
norm’ (1993, p. 8). Taking account of the performativity of the hegemonic political discourses can
enable us to shift the borders that delineate and establish the contours of the human within these
discourses. This in turn can create a possibility for a new politics of immigration, a politics that is
informed by an ethics of response and responsibility that goes beyond the set of moral obligations.
Looking at excluded, abject, non-human bodies positioned at the threshold of the legitimate political
community, Butler declares: The task is to refigure this necessary ‘outside’ as a future horizon, one in
which the violence of exclusion is perpetually in the process of being overcome. But of equal
importance is the preservation of the outside, the site where discourse meets its limits, where the
opacity of what is not included in a given regime of truth acts as a disruptive site of linguistic
impropriety and unrepresentability, illuminating the violent and contingent boundaries of that
normative regime precisely through the inability of that regime to represent that which might pose a
fundamental threat to its continuity. (1993, p. 53) Taking a cue from Butler, we might thus argue that
a responsible immigration politics should not be based on the idea of integration and immersion but
rather on the preservation of the outside as ‘the site where discourse meets its limits’. This does not
of course mean that all asylum seekers should be permanently kept on the threshold of the country or
community they want to enter, and that we should naively celebrate them as an irreducible alterity that
resists incorporation. However, it is to suggest that the biopolitics of devouring the other, of digesting
and disseminating him or her across the body politic, in fact forecloses on the examination of the
normative regime that establishes and legitimates the discourse of national identity. The ‘asylum
seeker’ - itself a product of the regime to which s/he is subsequently opposed - can only function on
the outside of that regime as its limitation and a guarantee of its constitution. (Once the community
truly opens itself up to what it does not know, both its knowledge of alterity and self-knowledge are
placed under scrutiny, a state of events that leads to the inevitable shifting of the boundaries between
the host as the possessor of goods and the newcomer as their ‘seeker’.) The idea of liberal
multiculturalism in which all alterity is welcomed and then quickly incorporated into the host
community risks occluding the violence at the heart of the constitution of this very community, even if
this community defines itself in terms of diversity or pluralism, and not necessarily national or ethnic
unity. The task of refiguring the ‘outside’ as a future horizon, without attempting to annul and absorb
this outside altogether, presents itself as a more responsible response to the ‘asylum question’.

The biopolitics of immigration culminates in the ethical bankruptcy of the border as a

mass grave.
Ajana 2006 [Btihaj, “Immigration Interrupted,” Journal for Cultural Research, 10.3]
Before extending my analysis any further, I would like, at this point, to return to Nancy’s argument
regarding absolute enclosure in order to discuss the impossibility of absolute immanence and as such
the non-viability of immigration control. According to Nancy (1991, p. 4) ‘The logic of the absolute
violates the absolute’. This statement alludes to the dialectical logic by which Nancy seeks to explain
how individualism, that is, the absolute separation from the outside, is not only impossible, but also,
self-contradictory. Self-contradictory inasmuch as for a separation to be ‘absolute’, it has to eradicate
any contact with the outside by not only closing around what it has to enclose (e.g. spatial particularity
– territory – which is yet exposed at its borders to another territory) but also, by closing around itself:
‘The absolute must be the absolute of its own absoluteness, or not be at all… to be absolutely alone, it
is not enough that I be so; I must also be alone being alone’ (Nancy 1991, p. 4). But this double move
of closure, according to Nancy, is self-contradictory. For when a closure closes around itself, it
becomes that which is closed rather than the closure as such. The absurdity of this will to
absoluteness may be illustrated here if we imagine how in order for a country to be absolutely
separated, it must have border controls of its own border controls! As such and insofar as absolute
separation is the predicate for absolute immanence, the latter becomes merely an illusionary utopia
fostered by immanentist politics whose aim is to exclude all that which is not to be included in its
immanentist state. The politics of immigration is in fact the realm where this utopia of immanentism
finds its expression. But despite the escalating efforts to bring this utopia into realisation,
governments are struggling in vain to control the freedom of movement for: Migrants and those who
facilitate their migration resort to staggering feats of ingenuity, courage and endurance to assert their
right to move and to flee … The question is how much suffering will be imposed on innocent people,
and how much racism will be stoked up… before governments finally abandon the effort. (Hayter
2000, p. 152) Let us now turn to the second aspect of the figuration of immanentism, technology. The
will to absolute separation rests upon the investment in technological apparatuses by which borders
are controlled and bodies are scanned in order to establish their (il)legitimacy. Several countries are
increasingly developing and implementing different modes of surveillance in order to measure,
anticipate and prevent any intrusion of unwanted individuals. Face-recognition, iris scanning,
fingerprinting, biometric cards, CCTV cameras in ports and detention centres, are all examples of the
technologies of surveillance through which governments are expressing, implicitly if not explicitly, the
imperative to administer and manage life, and subsequently exercise ‘biopolitics’. Nevertheless, the
biopolitics of immigration is not only the management of life but also the management of ‘a waiting-
to-live, a non-life’ Balibar (2002, p. 83). For when technology interacts with biology (with the aim to
categorise and differentiate), it creates what Foucault (2003 [1975], p. 255) calls ‘caesuras within the
biological continuum addressed by biopower’ so much so that the parameter of biological
differentiation and categorisation becomes the currency for life (of those who have legitimate access –
the belonging group, the healthy body), waiting-to-live (of those whose files are still being processed
by immigration officers or in the Home Office),2 [2. They are either placed in detention centres where
they are subjected to the gaze of constant surveillance or released (rather ‘abandoned’) without being
granted permission to work or access to support. In most cases, they have to report to police stations
on regular basis, while some even have to carry an electronic tracking tag/biometric Smart Card.] and
non-life (of those whose cases failed and they are therefore subject to deportation).3 [3. This category
may also include ‘les sans-papiers’ [undocumented people] as well; people who are living and working
in constant anxiety and fear for not having the necessary residence or work permits. They are hence
forced to succumb to exploitation, cheap labour and harsh working conditions. Les sans-papiers may
also be included in the ‘waiting-to-live’ category – in fact, they keep oscillating between the two.] The
fact that technology is an aspect of immanentist biopolitics, is in itself an attestation to how the
political has faded into a state of technicism (Coward 1999, p. 18) – a depoliticisation of society in the
Agambenian sense – in which governments’ policies and debates are merely technical discussions on
the type of mechanisms to be deployed in order to protect borders, filter movements, eliminate
infiltrations, and ultimately, sustain sovereignty by means of measurement and exclusion. Biopolitics,
nowadays, is too pervasive, too subtle that borders are no longer constituted around the ‘physical’
but actualised in the taken-for-granted institutional-organisational-administrative processes; in the
density and ubiquity of information networks. This perpetual actualisation of borders or what we may
refer to as ‘infinite bordering’ is enacted into our very ousia [being], creating far-reaching implications
on ‘bodies that do not matter’, bodies of those left to float in the Strait of Gibraltar, bodies of those
left to die on the US–Mexican border, bodies of those who are, at this very moment, being raped,
tortured and humiliated. Borders are becoming the epitome of Western hypocrisy: on the one hand,
they embody visions of Western progress, civilisation and technological advancements. On the other
hand, they are turning into mass graves, a monolithic disposal of dispensable bodies and unnecessary
existences. This is the dialectical reality of borders!

The alternative is to transgress borders. Rather than align with the affirmative’s
speech act which presumes the legitimacy of borders as a response to crises of
subjective encounters with Otherness, we give up on controlling who we are.
Ajana 2006 [Btihaj, “Immigration Interrupted,” Journal for Cultural Research, 10.3]
Although it is often argued that Levinas as well as Derrida’s unconditional hospitability cannot be
unproblematically (or even possibly) translated into a political action (Metselaar 2003, p. 9) insofar as it
is merely articulated at the level of the dual self-Other relationship rather than sociality as a whole (this
being particularly true of Levinasian ethics), their vision is, nonetheless, salient in terms of provoking a
radical transformation in social and political imaginaries and invoking the exigency of a ‘politics of
generosity that would foster rather than close off different ways of being’ (Diprose 2002, p. 172). Such
politics will not proceed from ‘a hermeneutics of depth’ (Rose 1999, p. 196) in which subjectivity is
wrought around self-containment, self-sufficiency and self-determinacy, presented as a project to be
accomplished. Instead, it might find its point of departure in the potential encounter with the other
and the total exposure to embodied alterity. For it is the experience of encountering and being-
exposed-to that infuses the crisis ‘into the hyphen at the heart of the nation-state’ (Coward 1999, p.
12) and undoes any immanentist attempt to essentialise identity, commonality and belonging. Whilst
it is unclear as to how such an ethico-political vision may be put into practice (perhaps this ‘not-
knowing-how’ would save this alternative vision from being turned into yet another figure of
immanentism), it may be that the rejection, transgression and obliteration of immigration controls are
to be regarded as the touchstone of this radical ethico-politics and an epitome of the necessary shift
from politics of borders to politics of singularities where ‘No One Is Illegal’ (Cohen 2003).
Links
Sovereign Power
 Borders Generic
Border policy reduces the particularly of singular lives to the categories of biopolitics
Ajana 2006 [Btihaj, “Immigration Interrupted,” Journal for Cultural Research, 10.3]
In recent years, the issue of immigration has pervaded contemporary political imaginary laying bare the
other face of globalisation, the other logic of capitalism, and exposing the existential uncertainty that
millions of people are facing today. Yet the political responses to the issue of immigration seem to rest
merely upon the immanentist1 vision of what Nancy (1991) calls ‘absolute enclosure’ manifested, for
example, in the politics of borders and figures of measurement in which quotas and numbers are
becoming metaphors for dignity and worth. Such responses attest to the policies of exclusion that the
majority of Western courtiers are wholeheartedly embracing through what Zylinska (2004, p. 523) terms
‘the biopolitics of immigration’, producing taxonomies in which ‘singular beings’ are turned into
classified categories such as the ‘illegal immigrant’, the ‘asylum seeker’, the ‘refugee’, the ‘bogus’, the
‘detainee’, the ‘deportee’ and so forth. These categories, whilst represented in most Western political
discourses as emblematic realities of ‘undemocratic’, ‘anti-freedom’ or ‘underdeveloped’ states,
continue to reveal the limits of Western sovereignty and expose the failure of modern governments to
live up to their promises of bringing security and justice to the world. Western governments are
permeated with assumptions vis-à-vis the prevalence of freedom and democracy. These assumptions
seem to be paradoxically and ironically giving the right to some to categorise, criminalise, demonise,
detain, expel and exclude, whilst invoking virtues of fairness and tolerance: ‘We live in a country which
places great store on democracy, tolerance, fair play and freedom of speech… We will set an annual
limit to immigration, including a quota for asylum seekers’ (Howard 2005). This enduring paradox which
animates the political discourse is indeed what reveals the hollowness of these claims (freedom and
democracy), which are, after all, mere figures of speech, ornaments hanging on the politics of exclusion
and regimes of domination. Such a paradox demands an interruption of these assumptions in order to
rethink the question of immigration and reconfigure the notion of otherness that dwells at the heart of
political philosophy. The ‘sense of panic’, as Cole (2000, p. 24) has it, concerning the issue of
immigration stems first and foremost from the tensions inherent in Western metaphysics of subjectivity.
These tensions are apparent in the ways in which the notion of ‘the citizen’ is dialectically constructed
as being both the universal (human being) and the particular (individual belonging to a specific state),
which accounts for the concepts of freedom and individuality on the one hand and concepts of
membership and commonality on the other. However, while these notions of universality and
particularity are inextricably interwoven together within the fabric of ‘citizen’, they are also perceived
within the political imaginary as being mutually exclusive (Coward 1999, p. 5). This synthetic separation
legitimises the order of sovereignty and gives rise to a myriad spatial partitions, all of which feed into the
politics of citizenship, in other words, the ‘politics of particularity’. Central to this politics of particularity
is the principle of inclusion (of good particulars) and exclusion (of bad particulars) through which ‘the
idea of normative universality’ (Zylinska 2004, p. 524) is established in relation to constitutive
particularity. Particularity in a sense could be understood as the partitioning of differences and the
demarcating of spatiality based on the ‘universal’ values of autonomy and self-governing, manifested
in the notion of statehood. The production and formulation of the particular citizen within particular
state is initially performed through modes of inclusion and exclusion whereby individual, communal
and national identities are conceived of in terms of dichotomies of self and other, of inside and
outside, of belonging and alien, and so on. The state, as such, represents itself as the locus par
excellence of spatial particularity – territoriality – through the politicisation of its borders, the
principle by which the concept of citizen is made possible. For without a state, the particular character
of the citizen dissolves into universality (being a human) and without citizens, there could be no state
(Coward 1999, p. 9). This interdependent relationship between state and citizens is in fact what
produces the spurious needs and rationalisation of division and containment which find their
expression in the ruling of sovereignty. Such a relationship also explains why each time the question of
immigration is raised by governments, there is a tendency to invoke the notion of ‘people’ i.e. ‘citizens’
in order to substantiate the will to exclusion and total enclosure, or what we may term ‘absolute
particularity’: I think most people would agree that Britain has reached a turning point. They know that
our communities cannot successfully absorb newcomers at today’s pace. (Howard 2005) However, this
absolute particularity, or at least the hysterical politics towards which it is progressing, ignores that
immigration controls (or indeed any form of closure) are ‘like a dam; when one hole is blocked,
another one appears somewhere else’ (Hayter 2000, p. 152). This metaphor is illustrated through the
practices of ‘alternative migration’ (so-called ‘clandestine’ migration), and all those whom, to borrow
Arendt’s expression, constitute the ‘the vanguard of their people’: those who expose the ethical
bankruptcy of Western politics, those who force open the ‘viscous spatio-temporal zone’ (Balibar 2002,
p. 83) (i.e. the border), those who refuse to succumb to the hindering of circulation imposed by rich
countries, and those, who of course, are forced into embarking on hostile journeys in order to seek
shelter or simply a better life. If such is the case, it is only because the world is a porous place, a place
made out of relations where ‘there has to be a clinamen[;] … an inclination or an inclining from one
toward the other, of one by the other, or from one to the other’ (Nancy 1991, p. 3). Absolute
particularity ignores this logic of clinamen. It ignores the logic of relatedness. Instead, it lends itself to
‘absolute immanence’ whereby being-with, being-in-common, or in fact, being at all, are understood
as that of which is constituted through the organisation of sameness (immanentist politics) or the
sharing of common substance (immanentist community). Such immanentist figurations function at the
level of self (state/ demos)-enclosure, that is, the sealing of the inside from the outside by means of a
total separation from any ‘unwanted’ and ‘foreign’ element that might permeate it. The politics of
immigration stands as the quintessential example of such figures of immanentism: ‘We will put in place
24-hour security at ports to prevent illegal immigration… Taken together our proposals will lead to a
substantial reduction in the number of people settling in the UK’ (Howard 2005).

Borders serve to proliferate divides not only between nation-states but between each
other
Anssi Paasi, Academy of Finland, 1-1-2012, "Border Studies Reanimated: Going beyond the
Territorial/Relational Divide," Environment and Planning A, Volume 44
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1068/a45282 - GDI John Melton

‘Border’ has been a key category for social scientists since the 19th century when modern state-
building and nation-building processes began to intensify in Europe. It is well known how Friedrich
Ratzel, for example, stressed the importance of borders for ‘political balance’. A lesser known pioneer in
border studies is the famous sociologist Georg Simmel, for whom “the boundary is not a spatial fact
with sociological consequences, but a sociological fact that forms itself spatially” (1997, page 142). He
discussed the roles of borders in social life and for consciousness, and concluded: “By virtue of the fact
that we have boundaries everywhere and always, so accordingly we are boundaries” (cited in
Ethington, 2007, page 480). Tester (1993, page 9) condensed Simmel’s ideas as follows: “ The
boundaries make life meaningful … but the very meaningfulness of life as something with a location and
most significantly a direction (i.e. life going as somewhere other than here), implies the flow of life over
permanent boundaries.” It is a sort of a paradox that the ‘border’ quickly became a catchword 100 years
later, simultaneously when the ideas of cosmopolitanism and the postnational/denationalized world
as well as the neoliberal rhetoric on a ‘borderless world’ appeared on the agenda. New interest was
aroused after the implosion of the ideological line between the capitalist and socialist world at the
turn of the 1990s, an event that gave rise to both new ethnonational borders and ethnic violence.
New attention also reverberated with ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ views on globalization (Paasi, 2003). More
than any other event, the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the USA and the consequent ‘war on terror’
generated security-related border research in which biopolitics, circulation, and technologies became
key issues (Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero, 2008). Indeed, if Simmel once stated that “people are
boundaries”, scholars are increasingly noting how people become borders (Balibar, 1998) and how
human bodies are key sites of borders in the current, biometrically managed world (Amoore, 2006). This
commentary will problematize the concept of border in a situation in which the social and political
meanings of borders have been rethought in academia as well as in the context of securitization of
state and suprastate (like the EU) spaces, and in which bounded spaces still have a role to play in the
mobilization of emotions, racism, xenophobia, and, ultimately, violence. While only two of the world’s
total twenty-nine major armed conflicts during 2001–10 have been interstate (SIPRI, 2011), a
remarkable hardening of state borders has simultaneously occurred around the world (Rosière and
Jones, 2012). I will first look at how the understanding of borders has evolved and how relational
thinking contests traditional border studies. Secondly, I will take some conceptual steps towards a
broader understanding of state borders that highlights both their porous and not-so-open qualities, thus
going beyond the territorial–relational divide.
 Borders = Sovereign Exception
The act of immigration models the exceptional act, subjecting migrants to the violent
interrogations and exclusions of the law
Salter, Professor at the School of Political Studies, University of Ottawa, 2006 (Mark B., “The Global
Visa Regime and the Political Technologies of the International Self: Borders, Bodies, Biopolitics,”
Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 31, Google Scholar, Accessed 7/9/18 GDI-GN

The court holds in this case that the exception of the border is not the result of a specific “exigent
circumstance” but rather the constant condition of threat represented by mobility. It is important that
the state’s right to search not be confined by any specific circumstance but rather the majority argues
that the exception to the Fourth Amendment is structural to the border , rather than a specific
emergency. In many ways, the state border resembles “the camp,” which Agamben describes as a place
where “the state of exception begins to become the rule . . . [what was once] essentially a temporary suspension of the
rule of law on the basis of a factual state of danger is now given permanent spatial arrangement, which nevertheless remains outside the
normal order.”25 Within the Nazi state that provides Agamben
with his paradigmatic example, admission to the
camps was made according to a series of institutions, such as racial courts, that decided the quality
and category of individuals.26 Foucault argues that we must progress from a theory of sovereignty,
which “is bound up with a form of power that is exercised over the land and the produce of the land,
much more so than over bodies and what they do,” toward a theory of a “disciplinary ” society that
constitutes and normalizes in addition to rejecting and excluding.27 I would argue it is a crucial supplement to
Agamben’s notion of sovereign decision that we examine Foucault’s biopolitics and the disciplinary society, which helps us explain and
understand the way in which obedience and choice are structured through a power/knowledge network. Zygmunt Bauman’s
investigation of the Holocaust is crucial to my reading of obedience and power in this respect: he
argues that the rationality of Jewish collaborators was undone in the asymmetrical environment of
the Nazi state. The question of agency in this case cannot simply be understood as collaboration : “Stakes
and resources are manipulated by those who truly control the situation: who are able to make some
choices too costly to be frequently selected by those whom they rule, while securing frequent and massive choices
which bring closer their aims and reinforce their control.”28 Power constructs the obedient subject but does not simply repress the
disobedient: resistances are possible. Thus,
we must look not simply at the “choice” to enter a state, but at how
that condition of mobility is rendered such that travelers facilitate their own entry into this state of
exception where their rights are abrogated. Derrida describes how becoming suppliant before the law
at the border is inevitable: The foreigner is someone whose name Mark B. Salter 173 must be asked in order
that he or she might be received. The foreigner must state and guarantee his or her identity, like a
witness before a court. This is someone to whom you put a question and address a demand, the first demand, the minimal demand being,
“What is your name?” or then “In telling me what your name is, in responding to this request, you are responding on your own behalf, you are
responsible before the law and before your hosts, you are a subject in law.”29 And yet, as
Agamben illustrates in terms of the
homo sacer, the appellant is subject to the law, but not a subject in the law. This article continues to
address the question of the politics of decision below. What are the asymmetric structures of choice that create the
frequent and massive movement of individuals through the border, into a zone of indistinction and control, where they are subject to the law
but do not enjoy rights? While the characteristics of the globalized world make movement necessary (in addition to desirable), the
structure of the global mobility regime reinforces the act of crossing the frontier as an exceptional act.
Borders exemplify the permanent state of exception, subjecting all individuals to the
law while withholding their rights
Salter, Professor at the School of Political Studies, University of Ottawa, 2006 (Mark B., “The Global
Visa Regime and the Political Technologies of the International Self: Borders, Bodies, Biopolitics,”
Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 31, Google Scholar, Accessed 7/9/18 GDI-GN

At the border, one is neither citizen nor foreigner in the face of the agent of customs, which we must take in both its
meanings.9 Agamben’s discussion of the state of exception has been especially provocative since the US

responses to the September 11 terror attacks. His portrayal of sovereign power as total, bare life, and
the model of “the camp,” have resonated with scholars from many disciplines. Agamben takes the arguments
of Carl Schmitt that the essential power of the sovereign is to decide when the law ceases to constrain
the sovereign: “sovereign is he who decides on the exception” as he famously puts it in the first line of Political Theology.10 The
power to describe a situation as normal or exceptional lies at the root of sovereignty: “A regular
situation must be created, and sovereign is he who decides if this situation is actually effective. . . . He has
monopoly over the final decision.”11 The border represents an exception to “normal” deliberative politics . While

Didier Bigo, David Lyon, and William Walters have all suggested ways in which airports and other
ports of entry might resemble the “camp,” in this article I want to push the argument further and suggest that the
border can be understood as a permanent state of exception. The border is a permanent “state of
exception” in that one may claim no rights but is still subject to the law.12 The law is always suspended
at the border, because the decision of entrance to the territory and correspondent membership in the
community is irreducible to force. As Schmitt argues, “the essence of the state’s sovereignty [is] not
the monopoly to coerce or rule, but the monopoly to decide.”13 The decision to include/exclude is
irreducible to the sovereign. Agamben’s account fails to understand the particular state of exception
at the state border and the decision to include/exclude; it lacks a capacity for agency . In this respect,
Foucault’s confessionary complex provides the missing component in Agamben’s discussion of
exceptional politics and explains the dynamics of both decision and agency. I turn to the question of agency below during the discussion of confession.

The border creates a state of exception by and through which all atrocities against the
immigrant are justified
Lewis Dowle 2017, "Spaces of Exception and Refusal? The Borderzone of Mexico/US," E-International Relations, http://www.e-
ir.info/2017/11/27/spaces-of-exception-and-refusal-the-borderzone-of-mexico-us/

Michel Foucault’s seminal observations regarding biopolitics concerned the discourse surrounding the
individual regulating their behaviour, but also the development of self-governing life (Sparke, 2006).
Foucault observed how since the 17th Century, biopower has prevailed reducing individuals to bare
life, stripping humanity down to the species-level. This process became biopolitics. Agamben pensively
asserts how in “modern biopolitics, sovereign is he who decides on the value or nonvalue of life”
(Agamben, 1998: 142). Biopolitics dictates life, defines it in relation to those within and beyond the
border, it is non-uniform in its impositions (Agamben, 1998; Doty, 2011). To Doty (2011), biopolitics is
seen explicitly in relation to the ‘Prevention through Deterrence’ policy which will be returned to.
Undocumented migrants are the subjects to Foucault’s biopower, with killing being much more than
murder, including leading others to death, political expulsion or deportation (Doty, 2011). With this
insight, the sovereign utilising biopolitics is now addressed. Agamben argues how the state of exception
is “the ability to decide if the law applies to a situation or if the law is held in abeyance due to an
emergency or crisis” (Salter, 2008: 366). However, this ‘exception’ in recent times has been prolonged
indefinitely. To Salter (2008), at the border, we discover a perennial state of exception. Acts of
exception feed off of crises, therefore the borderzone with its exchange of goods and persons, provide
for a crisis to legitimise actions and extreme measures (Salter, 2008). In the modern borderzone, the
amalgamation of biopower and a state of exception enforces sovereignty, discerning which lives are
adjudicated as valuable (Doty, 2011). The Mexico/US borderzone therefore becomes Agamben’s Camp
(Salter, 2008). Agamben (1998) defines the Camp as the space in which the exception becomes the rule,
where extreme practices are defined as normality. This abstract notion is deeply rooted in reality, with
lives being taken (be it directly or through Foucault’s indirect killing) whilst laws concerning these
actions exist but are circumvented by newer, more dominant ones (Bigo, 2006; Jones, 2012). This
authority of the elite is engrained within capitalism, with power and authority stemming from capital
accumulation. Through the state of exception, not only is the authority of the sovereign expounded to
society at large, but the policies of the US regarding Mexico’s migration are legitimised and its actions
unquestioned by the many (Jones, 2012). Furthermore, the space of exception at the borderzone is
shared by a force which strengthens and stipulates the sovereign: the space of refusal. As discussed,
sovereigns can determine which lives are worthy and which ones are declared bare life. Sovereignty is
also rooted in the development of the Ban-opticon, the ‘insignia’ of their authority (Bigo, 2006). The
crux of migration develops out of the Ban, what Didier Bigo (2006) relates to as the exclusion of the
individual in relation to the community, that which Agamben would refer to as being taken outside of
the ramifications and safety of the law into the abandoned and destitute life (Salter, 2008). This Ban-
opticon is enforced in the daily practices of the US border patrol, with constant decisions pertaining to
the inclusion or exclusion of those attempting to cross the border (Salter, 2008). It is here that the
undocumented migrant is found not only as the public enemy to the state, but also to the individuals
who are coerced through powerful discourses[1] to fear their arrival into their ‘territorial sanctity’ (Bigo,
2002; Purcell & Nevins, 2005). Undocumented migration is seen to mock the sovereignty of the US,
therefore in retaliation the US will operate a state of emergency, unleashing actions of exceptional
measures to cull this siege to power (Bigo, 2002). A common medium is to desecrate the sacredness of
life through the enforcement and ensuing dispossession of dignity. Bare Life To be deemed as bare life,
or homo sacer, is to be the leper in archaic times; it is to be constrained by the law but never sheltered
by it (Shewly, 2013). Doty asserts how through the varying states of exception, at its heart is the
decimation of the citizen adjudicated to be illicit or illegible, with states declaring subversively that
these bare lives “can be taken without apology, classified as neither homicide or sacrifice” (Doty,
2011: 601). The value of a migrant is seen only in relation to human capital, where the realpolitik of the
US economy is decreed above humanity, and as will be discussed, capitalism can turn the process of
creating bare life into financial gains. Bare lives can be taken without further questions being asked
through the public shattering of sanctity, with rights abolished and submission acquiesced (Agamben,
1998; Doty, 2011; Jones, 2012). This can be exemplified perhaps no clearer than through the ‘Prevention
through Deterrence’ policy in relation to the Mexico/US borderland (Doty, 2011).

Passports are the method by which the sovereign determines who is worthy and
unworthy
Lewis Dowle,, 11-27-2017, "Spaces of Exception and Refusal? The Borderzone of Mexico/US," E-International Relations, http://www.e-
ir.info/2017/11/27/spaces-of-exception-and-refusal-the-borderzone-of-mexico-us/

According to Schmittian theory, sovereignty is nullified in the absence of an enemy (Doty, 2007). When
an enemy is discerned, states can legitimise their behaviour through the contradictions between
us/them creating fusion, yet also fissures, within and between states. Against much public and political
opinion, Doty (2007) provocatively claims the undocumented migrant as the enemy as opposed to a
fear of terror. Sovereigns desire and dictate normality beginning with the border in the aim to ensure
political stability (Doty, 2007; Purcell & Nevins, 2005). Despite this, migrants break this “continuity
between man and citizen, nativity and nationality, they put the originary fiction of modern
sovereignty in crisis” (Agamben, 1998: 131, emphasis in original). The very borders these migrants
transgress are the source of constructed identities for the citizen and the state (Salter, 2008). Within
these borderzones, sovereigns may employ extremities to ensure their dominance and the respective
submission of the migrant (Jones, 2012). Sovereign is the one who defines those who are worthy
contra to those deemed inadequate (Doty, 2011). Sovereignty (re)produces itself spatially, serving as a
dynamic and ruthless process of power. Jones (2012) highlights how the sovereignty of many nations is
intimately linked to the history of the people living in certain lands. If this assertion holds, the US
sovereignty is dubious at best. Nevertheless, the US sovereignty commands and controls as required,
holding fast the ability to disband rights, citizens and belongings for the greater good of the state.
Regarding this realpolitik framework from Rochau, states strive and lust for power and treasure the
state’s health above all else. To Schmitt and Agamben, this legitimisation discourse is powerful, as
states define exceptional activities as reasonable and necessary, proceeding to enforce dominance
through violence and control (Doty, 2007; Jones, 2012). One such example is the passport (Salter,
2008). Allocated to those counted as worthy by the sovereign, the medium of the passport serves to
symbolise the relationship between states. The individual is reduced to bare life as will be discussed
later, with physical and emotional probing deemed appropriate as the citizen is assumed a role
stripped of rights and dignity with the sovereign raised further still. Inextricable to these practices is
the notion of biopower and biopolitics which will now be discussed.

The border is a zone of absolute indeterminacy between anomie and law; the ability
to regulate borders emanates from a claim to the power of sovereign exception.
Agamben 2005 [Giorgio, professor of aesthetics at the University of Verona, State of Exception, p. 56-
57]

The division between sovereign power and the exercise of that power corresponds exactly to that
between norms of law and norms of the realization of law, which in Dictatorship was the foundation of
commissarial dictatorship. In Political Theology Schmitt responded to Benjamin’s critique of the dialectic
between constituent power and constituted power by introducing the concept of decision, and to this
countermove Benjamin replies by bringing in Schmitt’s distinction between the norm and its realization.
The sovereign, who should decide every time on the exception, is precisely the place where the
fracture that divides the body of the law becomes impossible to mend: between Macht and Vermogen,
between power and its exercise, a gap opens which no decision is capable of filling. This is why, with a
further shift, the paradigm of the state of exception is no longer the miracle, as in Political Theology,
but the catastrophe. “In antithesis to the historical idea of restoration, [the baroque] is faced with the
idea of catastrophe. And it is in response to this antithesis that the theory of the state of exception is
devised” (Benjamin 1928, 246/66) An unfortunate emendation in the text of the Gesammelte Schriften
has prevented all the implications of this shift from being assessed. Where Benjamin’s text read, Es gibt
eine barocke Eschatologie, “there is a baroque eschatology” the editors, with a singular disregard for all
philological care, have corrected it to read: Es gibt keine ...,“there is no baroque eschatology” (Benjamin
1928, 246/66). And yet the passage that follows is logically and syntactically consistent with the original
reading: “and for that very reason [there is] a mechanism that gathers and exalts all earthly creatures
before consigning them to the end [dem Ende].” The baroque knows an eskhaton, an end of time; but,
as Benjamin immediately makes clear, this eskhaton is empty. It knows neither redemption nor a
hereafter and remains immanent to this world: “The hereafter is emptied of everything that contains
the slightest breath of this world, and from it the baroque extracts a profusion of things that until then
eluded all artistic formulation . . . in order to clear an ultimate heaven and enable it, as a vacuum, one
day to destroy the earth with catastrophic violence” (246/66). It is this “white eschatology”—which
does not lead the earth to a redeemed hereafter, but consigns it to an absolutely empty sky —that
configures the baroque state of exception as catastrophe. And it is again this white eschatology that
shatters the correspondence between sovereignty and transcendence, between the monarch and God,
that defined the Schmittian theologico-political. While in Schmitt “the sovereign is identified with God
and occupies a position in the state exactly analogous to that attributed in the world to the God of the
Cartesian system” (Schmitt 1922, 43/46), in Benjamin the sovereign is “confined to the world of cre-
ation; he is the lord of creatures, but he remains a creature” (Benjamin 1928, 246/66). This drastic
redefinition of the sovereign function implies a different situation of the state of exception. It no
longer appears as the threshold that guarantees the articulation between an inside and an outside, or
between anomie and the juridical context, by virtue of a law that is in force in its suspension: it is,
rather, a zone of absolute indeterminacy between anomie and law, in which the sphere of creatures
and the juridical order are caught up in a single catastrophe.
 Inclusion = Exception
The affirmative spearheads a form of biopolitics that has evolved from bringing death
into play in the field of sovereignty to a form of universal acceptance that violently
reduces refugees to abject beings. [1nc shell]
Zylinska, Referee for the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada,
2014 (Joanna, “The universal acts, Judith Butler and the biopolitics of immigration,” Cultural Studies
18.4, GDI JM)

In his own reading of Antigone in the context of hospitality towards the alien and the foreign, Jacques
Derrida justifies referring to classical figures in the context of contemporary political matters by
arguing that these ‘urgent contemporary matters’ ‘do not only bring the classical structures into the
present. They interest us and we take a look at them at the points where they seem, as though of
themselves, to deconstruct these inheritances or the prevailing interpretations of these inheritances’
(2000, p. 139). Derrida does not of course suggest abandoning these classical structures altogether once
they have been placed ‘in deconstruction’, but rather thinking them differently, or allowing them to
reveal, ‘as though of themselves’, certain ambiguities inherent in them, ambiguities that will in turn
allow us to interpret and enact our current democratic laws in a new way. To give an example of such an
enactment of the Greek democratic tradition in our twenty-first century polis , I want to look at another
borderline character in Sophocles’s Antigone (2000): the figure of Tiresias. The blind prophet Tiresias
seems to have returned to the British state in the figure of UK Home Secretary, David Blunkett,
proponent of the new immigration regime and author of the White Paper, ‘Secure Borders, Safe Haven:
Integration with Diversity in Modern Britain’ (February 2002), a document that paved the way for the
subsequent Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act. What is it that links Tiresias with Blunkett, apart
from their physical blindness? In Sophocles’ play, Tiresias appears before Creon to warn him that
Thebes is on the ‘edge of peril’ and that Creon should ‘listen to the voice of reason’ and withdraw his
prohibition against the burial of Antigone’s brother, Polynices. On hearing Creon’s refusal to open the
city gates, Tiresias accuses Creon of suffering from ‘the disease of wealth’ and predicts the impending
wrath of gods that will descend upon Creon and his family. The figure of Tiresias as a blind seer on the
border of the polis is particularly relevant for me in the context of current legislation regarding asylum
and immigration in Western democracies. However, one might perhaps say that it is too facile a gesture
to ‘equate’ a modern Western politician with an ancient prophet of doom and gloom on the basis of
their shared ‘disability’, or even that it is inappropriate to draw attention to Blunkett’s actual blindness.
Aware of such possible reservations, I am nevertheless prepared to risk accusations of impropriety and
pursue the Tiresian (dis)inheritance, and its accompanying blind spots, in the discourse on immigration
and asylum as developed in the UK government’s White Paper, ‘Secure Borders, Safe Haven’.5 ‘Secure
Borders, Safe Haven’ opens with a foreword, which has been authored and signed by the Home
Secretary himself. Blunkett adopts here a somewhat paternalistic, sermon-like tone to explain to the
British public that ‘There is nothing more controversial, and yet more natural, than men and women
from across the world seeking a better life for themselves and their families’.6 In his apparent attempt
to win over ‘the British public’, he establishes a sequence of (il)logical equivalences (e.g. between a
‘natural’ desire for migration and a ‘natural’ feeling of apprehension felt by those whose territory the
migrants enter) that are supposed to embrace and convey how ‘the nation’ feels about the issue of
immigration. In a tone reminiscent of the Greek prophet, Blunkett speaks about the need to offer ‘a
safe haven’ to ‘those arriving on our often wet and windy shores’. Just as Tiresias takes it upon himself
to point out that Creon speaks unwisely, the Home Secretary addresses and unravels the anxieties of all
those self-appointed guardians of the national shores (from editors of tabloid newspapers to ‘my home
is my castle’ John Bulls) who want to turn Britain into a fortress. Blunkett’s discussion of the problems
connected with migration and asylum is supposed to rebuke accusations that Britain is out of line with
other European nations in the way in which it deals with illegal immigration and asylum seekers, and
that ‘people coming through the Channel Tunnel, or crossing in container lorries, constitutes an
invasion’. Blunkett’s Foreword is thus aimed ‘against false perception’, which he attempts to overcome
with ‘clarity’ and reason. Blunkett lays out his argument carefully, indicating errors in the public
perception and correcting them with his own argument. But it is not only the correction of errors that
interests the Home Secretary. Blunkett’s primary aim is the development of an immigration and asylum
policy that ‘looks forward’. As if repeating the instruction given to Creon by Triesias, Blunkett warns the
people not to act unwisely; he explains carefully that migration brings significant benefits and that it can
advance the prosperity of the nation, provided it is properly managed. This last reservation makes
Blunkett a thrifty prophet, resorting to the discourse of economics and management to explain his
vision. As we know from Foucault, the biopolitics of modern democracies works precisely through ‘the
administration of bodies and the calculated management of life’ (1984, p. 140). As if to illustrate this, it
is by means of proposing ‘rational controlled routes’ of immigration (rather than ‘the international ‘‘free
for all’’, the so called ‘‘asylum shopping’’ throughout Europe, and the ‘‘it is not our problem’’ attitude
which is too often displayed’) that Blunkett hopes to promote his policy. However, the calculated
rationality of his outlook seems permanently threatened by the irrational - coming not only from the
opponents of his policy but also from the author of the White Paper himself. After laying out his
proposal for a ‘rational’ and ‘controlled’ economic migration and asylum system, Blunkett adds: ‘It is
possible to square the circle’. At this instant the voice of reason founders, and immigration policy reveals
that it is only a very rough sketch, one that allows the draughtsman to resort to illicit geometrical moves
in order to complete the picture. Indeed, Blunkett’s prophetic vision for Britain as a ‘safe haven’
depends on a number of exclusions firmly in place. First, the Home Secretary affirms that this new vision
will only work if we are ‘secure within our sense of belonging and identity’. Significantly, Butler makes it
clear that ‘This exclusionary matrix by which subjects are formed thus requires a simultaneous
production of a domain of abject beings, those who are not yet ‘‘subjects’’, but who form the
constitutive outside to the domain of the subject’ (1993, p. 3). At best a utopian fantasy of
homeliness, at worst a conscious foreclosure of ethics of openness to the alterity of the other -/ an
alterity that always poses a challenge to our own security and self-knowledge -/ Blunkett’s politics of
migration therefore seems premised on a logical impossibility.7 It is a hospitality that is in fact based on
the originary closure, on foreseeing the foreign threat and trying to avert it. This is the moment when
the classical heritage gives way to bizarre miscegenation. Blunkett-Tiresias stops instructing Creon to
actually become Creon : a protector of the public sphere whose law both produces and excludes the
unlawful, those without the integrity and belonging shared by the members of the polis . For it is this
when he goes on to announce: ‘We have fundamental moral obligations which we will always honour’,
only to counterbalance this claim with the following reservation: ‘At the same time, those coming into
our country have duties that they need to understand and which facilitate their acceptance and
integration’. His paradoxical immigration policy of ‘squaring the circle’ is also described as ‘a ‘‘two-way
street’’ requiring commitment and action from the host community, asylum seekers and long-term
migrants alike’. It is perhaps not surprising (which does not mean it is intentional on Blunkett’s part) that
a linguistic paradox is used when outlining our moral obligations and their duties, since the asylum
seekers’ position ‘before the law’ itself entails a paradox: even though they are outside it, they are
supposedly subject to its power. Constituted as threshold political beings, migrants and ‘asylum seekers’
are defined precisely through their liminal status that places them on the outskirts of the community.
Then how can they be expected to ‘have duties’ imposed on them by the host community and manifest
commitment to these duties if this very community needs a prior definition of itself, a definition that
confirms identity and belonging in relation, or even opposition, to what might threaten it? We also need
to consider how the political status of asylum seekers and migrants is actually established. Who
legislates the duties that they will be expected to follow? What is the source of the moral obligation that
will help Britons ‘manage’ the asylum issue? Agamben explains that ‘The sovereign decides not the licit
and the illicit but the originary inclusion of the living in the sphere of law’ (1998, p. 26).8 To what
extent, then, is the sovereign entitled to impose the law on those whose identity he defines as being
situated ‘before’ the law, both in the spatial and temporal sense? In particular, given that Iraqis
constitute the majority of all asylum seekers in the UK, is this conditional openness in the context of the
‘Gulf War II’, not a certain blind spot in the rhetoric and politics of the sovereign government that does
not see a connection between the Iraqi refugees from their own country, whose lives are threatened by
Western bombs, and the Iraqi asylum seekers trying to come into Britain? This form of politics, with its
underlying moral obligations, seems to be based on a certain occluded but inevitable and thus
constitutive violence, where ‘the sovereign is the point of indistinction between violence and law, the
threshold on which violence passes over into law and law passes into violence’ (Agamben 1998, p. 32).
Indeed, even the very process of naming an Iraqi, Albanian or Kurdish refugee an ‘asylum seeker’,
towards whom the hospitality of the host nation is to be extended, is inevitably violent. Butler
explains that ‘The naming is at once the setting of a boundary, and also the repeated inculcation of a
norm’ (1993, p. 8). Taking account of the performativity of the hegemonic political discourses can
enable us to shift the borders that delineate and establish the contours of the human within these
discourses. This in turn can create a possibility for a new politics of immigration, a politics that is
informed by an ethics of response and responsibility that goes beyond the set of moral obligations.
Looking at excluded, abject, non-human bodies positioned at the threshold of the legitimate political
community, Butler declares: The task is to refigure this necessary ‘outside’ as a future horizon, one in
which the violence of exclusion is perpetually in the process of being overcome. But of equal
importance is the preservation of the outside, the site where discourse meets its limits, where the
opacity of what is not included in a given regime of truth acts as a disruptive site of linguistic impropriety
and unrepresentability, illuminating the violent and contingent boundaries of that normative regime
precisely through the inability of that regime to represent that which might pose a fundamental threat
to its continuity. (1993, p. 53) Taking a cue from Butler, we might thus argue that a responsible
immigration politics should not be based on the idea of integration and immersion but rather on the
preservation of the outside as ‘the site where discourse meets its limits’. This does not of course
mean that all asylum seekers should be permanently kept on the threshold of the country or
community they want to enter, and that we should naively celebrate them as an irreducible alterity that
resists incorporation. However, it is to suggest that the biopolitics of devouring the other, of digesting
and disseminating him or her across the body politic, in fact forecloses on the examination of the
normative regime that establishes and legitimates the discourse of national identity. The ‘asylum
seeker’ - itself a product of the regime to which s/he is subsequently opposed - can only function on
the outside of that regime as its limitation and a guarantee of its constitution. (Once the community
truly opens itself up to what it does not know, both its knowledge of alterity and self-knowledge are
placed under scrutiny, a state of events that leads to the inevitable shifting of the boundaries between
the host as the possessor of goods and the newcomer as their ‘seeker’.) The idea of liberal
multiculturalism in which all alterity is welcomed and then quickly incorporated into the host
community risks occluding the violence at the heart of the constitution of this very community, even if
this community defines itself in terms of diversity or pluralism, and not necessarily national or ethnic
unity. The task of refiguring the ‘outside’ as a future horizon, without attempting to annul and absorb
this outside altogether, presents itself as a more responsible response to the ‘asylum question’.

Borders are the spatial site where surveillance and discipline give substance to the
working of biopolitics and biopower. Border control is biopolitical precisely because it
isn’t simply about who we exclude; it is also about who we deem worthy of belonging
to our body politic.
Ajana 2005 [Btihaj, “Surveillance and Biopolitics,” Electronic Journal of Sociology]
Subtle, internalised, and smooth (but not all too smooth) as it is, (post)panoptical surveillance induces a
certain conscious relation to the self and organises the ‘criteria’ for inclusion and exclusion (Rose, 1999:
243). Borders are thus the spatio-temporal zone par excellence where surveillance gives substance to
the working of biopolitics and the manifestation of biopower. In this case mobility itself becomes
intrinsically linked to processes of the ‘sorting’ of individualised citizens from massified aliens. We can
almost forgive theorists such as Bauman (1998, in Boyne, 2000: 286) for wanting to articulate a
dichotomous logic that hinges on the notion of border, for, at times and at least with regard to
circulation (that is, the circulation of ‘people’, for as far as ‘commodities’ and ‘capital’ are concerned,
their free movement is encouraged and sustained by the global capitalist machine), the world seems to
be divided into two. Those who have European/American/Australian/Canadian passports and those who
do not. We all know all too well what difference this makes in terms of border crossing. Nevertheless,
such conceptualisation misses the point that borders are not merely that which is erected at the edges
of territorial partitioning and spatial particularity, but more so borders are ubiquitous (Balibar, 2002:
84) and infinitely actualised within mundane processes of ‘internal’ administration and bureaucratic
organization1 blurring the dualistic logic of the inside and the outside on which Western sovereignty is
calibrated. The point is that in addition to this crude dual division within the global world order there
are further divisions, further segmentations, a ‘hypersegmentation’ (Hardt, 1998: 33) at the heart of that
monolithic (Western) half which functions by means of excluding the already-excluded on the one hand
and incorporating the already-included and the waiting-to-be-included excluded on the other. This is
done more or less dialectically, more or less perversely, including and excluding concurrently ‘through a
principle of activity’ (Rose, 1999: 240) and interwoven circuits of security. Surveillance is the enduring of
exclusion for some and the performance of inclusion for others to the point where it becomes almost
impossible to demonstrate one’s ‘inclusion’ without having to go through the labyrinth of security
controls and identity validation, intensified mainly, but not solely, at the borders. It is in similar
contexts that Balibar (2002: 81) invokes the notion of ‘world apartheid’ in which the dual regime of
circulation is creating different phenomenological experiences for different people through the
‘polysemic nature’ (Balibar, 2002: 81) of borders. For as we have discussed, borders are not merely
territorial dividers but spatial zones of surveillance designed to 1 Examples may include access to public
health services and social benefits, applying for a National Insurance Number, applying for a bank
account or credit cards, etc, insofar as these activities require a ‘valid’ identity i.e. documents which
‘secure’ that the person has the right to reside in the country. 9 establish ‘an international class
differentiation’ and deploy ‘instruments of discrimination and triage’ (Balibar, 2002: 82) whereby the
rich asserts a ‘surplus of right’ (Balibar, 2002: 83) and the poor continue to exercise the Sisyphean
activity of circulating upwards and downwards until the border becomes his/her place of ‘dwelling’
(Kachra, 2005: 123) or until s/he becomes the border itself. Sadly, to be a border is to ‘live a life which is
a waiting-to-live, a non-life’ (Balibar, 2002: 83). The biopolitics of borders is precisely the management
of that waiting-to-live, the management of that non-life (the waiting-to-live and the non-life of those
who are forcibly placed in detention centres), and at times, it is the management of death. The death
of thousand of refugees and ‘clandestine’ migrants drowned in the sea (for instance, in the Strait of
Gibraltar which is argued to be becoming the world’s largest mass grave), asphyxiated in trucks (as was
the fate of 58 Chinese immigrants who died in 2000 inside an airtight truck at the port of Dover),
crushed under trains (the case of the Channel Tunnel) and killed in deserts (in the US-Mexican border
for example). It is the management of ‘bodies that do not matter’. It is the management of the bodies of
those to whom the status of the ‘homo sacer’ (Agamben, 1998: 8) is attributed. It is the management of
those whose death has fallen into the abyss of insignificance and whose killing is not sacrificial (except to
the few). On the other hand, the biopolitics of borders is also the management of ‘life’; the life of
those who are capable of performing ‘responsible self-government’ (Rose, 1999: 259) and self-
surveillance i.e. those who can demonstrate their ‘legitimacy’ through ‘worthy’ computer-readable
passports/ID cards that provide the ontological basis for the exercising and fixing of identity and
citizenship at the border. The juxtaposition of death and life at the borders is by no means an ad hoc
occurrence but an affirmation of the inadequate immigration policies and the ‘immanentist’ (Nancy,
1991: 3) politics of absolute enclosure. From this emerges the issue of ‘sorting’ that may override the
term ‘racism’ as long as it is not designated to a specific race or insofar as it is ‘racism without race’ as
Balibar prefers to put it. Racism for Foucault (2003 [1976]: 255) (and here racism has a figurative
function just as the metaphors of leprosy and plague do) is that 10 which creates fragmentation within
the biological continuum and caesuras within species-bodies so that biopolitical sorting and
(sub)divisions could take place between those who are deemed to be ‘superior’ and those who are
made to be perceived as the ‘inferior’ type all with the aim to preserve the ‘well-being’, ‘safety’,
‘security’ and ‘purity’ of the ‘healthy’ (powerful) population (‘virtues’ which are undoubtedly
contributing to the naturalisation and taken-for-grantedness of institutional racism, and the inscription
of modes of exclusionary differentiations in many subtle ways so that the need of accountability is made
redundant.)

Passports and citizenship status provide no check to the sovereign violence, only
reinscribe the right to exile and exclude through the metacommunal right of the
sovereign to determine rights
Salter, Professor at the School of Political Studies, University of Ottawa, 2012 (Mark B., “Theory of
the / : The Suture and Critical Border Studies,” Geopolitics, Vol. 17, Iss. 4, October, EBSCO, Accessed
7/10/18 GDI-GN)

The international sphere – though constitutive of the threshold of sovereignty – is almost completely absent
from Agamben’s political theory.48 The thresholds that are so important to the sovereign, and the
ability of the sovereign to include and exclude, are not defined against emptiness, terra nullius, the desert, the
sea, or outer-space. Sovereigns are mutually constituted by a metacommunity of other sovereigns: the
ability of the sovereign to declare the law is dependent on the absence of law at the meta-sphere .
“Metacommunity” is a more useful term than international relations or world politics term to describe the inter-
sovereign environment, despite being a slightly clumsy neologism, because it does not inherit the modern notion
of the “nation,” “globe” or “world” and allows comparisons between different kinds of inter-
communal societies, including those in Ancient Greece which are determined more by a distinction between Greek and barbarian than
between Athenians and Spartans.49 The expansion of the contemporary metacommunity – structured around
the ideal of juridically equal sovereign states – has only emerged over the past fifty years with the
onset of decolonisation and the maturation of international law through the United Nations . Before
that, the metacommunity was characterised by formal juridical inequality amongst sovereigns. In the
contemporary scene, most scholars would readily admit that some states were more sovereign than others .
But, from the point of view of modern international law, sovereigns in their interactions do not have the constitutional
or political power to ban or to exclude another sovereign . Sovereignty functions in international law to nominally protect
the absolute right to ban, because the rules of the inter-sovereign metacommunity are a fundamentally
different type than domestic sovereign relations .50 To our mind, the example of the passport
demonstrates this: while passports are assumed to represent belonging and the legal status of
citizenship, they are in fact representative of the Theory of the / 743 inter-sovereign metacommunity. The
passport is the request (not requirement) of one sovereign to treat the citizen well – but there can be no obligations
on that foreign power, except those limitations or obligations to which the foreign sovereign binds itself. The
passport is nothing but a reinscription of the absolute power of the sovereign to decide on the right to
have rights, and the mutual construction of that power between sovereigns. The border similarly represents that
mutually constituted limit of the sovereign’s ability to decide to decide. The transgression of a particular border
may trigger war or United Nations sanctions, but it precisely does not cause the system of sovereign states to unravel. Agamben
illuminates his nascent theory of the constitution of the inter-sovereign metacommunity when he
discusses the refugee question. As Arendt argues in the aftermath of the First World War, the metacommunity asserted
a complete monopoly on the legitimate definition on citizenship and statelessness , first through the
practice of the Nansen passports and the League of Nations High Commission for Refugees and later
through the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the 1951 Geneva Refugee Convention .51
In these institutions and practices, sovereigns reaffirmed their absolute right to define citizenship , that is the
claim to inclusion, and to define and manage those individuals outside of that system without limiting
their rights to exile, to prohibit entry, or to render individuals stateless. Agamben attempts a reversal of this move: “Inasmuch as the
refugee, an apparently marginal figure, unhinges the old trinity of state-nation-territory, it deserves instead to be regarded as the central figure
of our political history.”52 However, Agamben misses precisely the inter-sovereign character of this move. It
was not a single
sovereign making a decision to ban a particular group that became stateless or refugees. Rather,
sovereigns came together within these institutions to decide the mutual and shared bounds on the
exercise of their own absolute power. The refugee question cannot be comprehended or explained without the metacommunity
of sovereigns. It is precisely these inter-sovereign dynamics of the metacommunity that Agamben
neglects, and this neglects stems from his reliance and reading of Aristotle, who – despite his relationship with
one of the great imperialists of the Classical age – did not devote a great deal of his writing to inter-state relations .53
 Inclusion = Biopolitics of Mobility
“The border at work” sorts legitimate and non-legitimate mobile subjects. Border
control is no longer a fixed map, but rather a series of technologically ephemeral
systems, complicating geopolitical notions of inside and outside while producing new
forms of social control.
Vaughan-Williams, Professor of International Security and Head of the Department of
Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick, 2010 (Nick, “The UK border
security continuum: virtual biopolitics and the simulation of the sovereign ban,” Environment and
Planning D: Society and Space, 4/26/10, pg.s 2-4, https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/people/vaughan-
williams/publications/nvw_uk_border_security_continuum_epd_10.pdf, Accessed 7/9/18, GDI-JV)

In Securing the UK Border, for example, two models of `the border' are presented: a traditional ``single staffed
physical frontier, where travellers show paper-based identity documents'', and a new border doctrine
fit to deal with ``the step change in mobility that globalisation has brought to our country'' (Home Office,
2007, page 3). The main factor prompting the need for the new doctrine, ``exponential growth in global movement'', is
presented as potentially both a good and bad phenomenon for the UK (Home Office, 2007, page 2). On the one hand, it
is said to ``bring great opportunity'', such as the contribution of those working legally to GDP (page 2). On the other hand, it is claimed that the
scale of global mobility ``creates new challenges'', including identity fraud, illegal immigration,
organised crime, and international terrorism (Home Office, 2007, page 2). On this basis, it is argued that an
approach which balances economic prosperity with security imperatives is required: ``The goal is to
find the optimal relation between an appropriate degree of security, and the free flow of people and
goods'' (Cabinet Office, 2007, page 28). As such, the aim of the new doctrine is to simultaneously deter `risky'
subjects (potential fraudsters, illegal immigrants, criminals, or terrorists) while welcoming in trusted subjects (business
people, tourists,`bona fide' asylum seekers, legal economic migrants): ``The aim of border control is to sort traffic into
legitimate and non-legitimate and maximise the effort directed against movements that would,
without action by the state, be detrimental to the UK, while minimising the burden on those that would not'' (Cabinet Office,
2007, page 48). Thus, rather than operating simply as a `barrier' or obstacle in the physical sense of a wall,
``the border at work'' here is one that seeks to enhance mobility, circulation, and flow. The aim of this paper
is to examine the vision of what and where the UK border is according to the new doctrine. It begins by tracing moves to transform the UK's
border from a static, physical frontier located at ports, airports, and other traditional sites of border control on UK territory to a more
electronic, invisible, and impalpable ``global network of border security'' (Home Office, 2006, page 11). The discussion draws on a range of
official documentation produced by the Cabinet Office, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and the Home Office, together with data
collected from presentations given by companies providing border solutions to the UK government at the 2008 and 2009 Homeland and Border
Security Conference in Westminster. It proceeds by identifying three key characteristics of the vision for UK border security: the `offshoring' of
the border away from UK territory, the reliance on technologically advanced forms of identity management, and an increasingly preemptive
logic based on risk profiling. From here the analysis explores how transformations in the UK border challenge conventional notions of what and
where borders are in contemporary political life.The paper then examines the prospects of two alternative paradigmsöthe biopolitical and the
virtualöfor developing border thinking beyond the confines of the modern geopolitical imagination. Throughout the various documents
outlining the UK's new border doctrine are multiple references to the need to `offshore' bordering practices: `` Border control can no
longer be a fixed line on a map. Using new technologies ... we must create a new offshore line of
defence'' (Home Office, 2007, page 2). ``The aim is to create a new offshore line of defence to check individuals as far from the UK as possible
and through each part of their journey'' (Cabinet Office, 2007, page 31). ``We want to extend the concept of exporting our
borders around the world'' (Home Office, 2006, page 11). The concept of `offshore' bordering, though not
unique to the UK context, has come to underpin the government's approach to `security in a global
hub'.(1) Central to this concept is the notion that by the time `risky' subjects have arrived at traditional border crossings on UK territory, such
as ports and airports, it is simply too late. Rather, the stated innovation is to take the border to the perceived locus of threat before `it' departs
for the UK in the first place. In one sense, there is quite literally an `exporting' of the border so that it is physically transported to territory
overseas through `juxtaposed controls' whereby the UK monitors mobility in other states and vice versa. For example, since 2001 the UK has
taken its border to sites in Boulogne, Brussels, Calais, Coquelles, Dunkerque, Frethun, Lille, and Paris in order ``to detect and deter potential
clandestine illegal immigrants before they are able to set foot on UK soil, fundamentally altering the way the UK operates at its border''
(Cabinet Office, 2007, page 38). In
addition to traditional forms of border control reliant on paper
documentation, new technologies such as carbon dioxide probes, X-ray scanners, heart-beat sensors,
and heat detectors have been rolled out in order to detect the illegal entry of people concealed in
freight (Cabinet Office, 2007, page 38). In another sense, offshore bordering also relates to other forms of
control on movement that are increasingly not related to territory in any straightforward way and
rather that are more electronic, invisible, and ephemeral. These practices enable the expansion of UK border operations
beyond reciprocal ventures with fellow EU member states. Indeed, one of the main objectives of the new UKBA is to reach beyond Europe in an
attempt to `globalise' the UK's border (Home Office, 2006, page 11). In this context we find the development of a global network of overseas
border security advisors such as Airline Liaison Officers (ALOs). The role of ALOs, of whom there are currently fifty-five working across thirty-two
states worldwide, is to work with local intelligence and law-enforcement agencies to ``detect and deter inadequately documented passengers''
(Cabinet Office, 2007, page 38). Anotherdimension of offshore bordering practices that complicates the
traditional relation between borders and territory is the implementation of the new `e-Borders
programme'. This initiative, which involves data capture prior to travel and analysis undertaken at the new Joint e-Borders Operations
Centre, aims to literally count `most foreign nationals' in and out of the UK.(2) While older forms of border control continue at conventional
points of entry across UK territory, the new border doctrine implies a shift in thinking in government and policy-
making arenas about what and where `the border' should be in an increasingly `interdependent
world' (Cabinet Office, 2008). Indeed, the offshore projection of the UK's border is interesting precisely because it complicates
commonsensical geopolitical notions about the location of borders as well as conventional
understandings of the distinctions between inside and outside, domestic and international, and so on.
Although, as I shall go on to argue, such offshoring does not necessarily eradicate these distinctions, these practices do challenge
the prevalent assumption in the modern geopolitical imagination that states' borders are coterminous
with their territorial limits.

Status quo conceptions of borders construct and manage our binary understanding of
the world—we are seduced into believing that the binary part of concepts like
“inside/outside,” “us/them,” and “open/closed” can really obtain in the world
because we are attracted to certainty and security. In reality, the border and the
world slips—but we put it back into the place through violent reductionisms and
managerialisms.
Lalonde, Professor in the Department of Sociology and Legal Studies 2017 [Patrick,
“Cyborg Work: Borders as Simulation,” The British Journal of Criminology azx070,
https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azx070] GDI-CL

As Newman (2006: 176) indicates, notions of difference and ‘othering’ in the form of binary pairings
(inside versus outside, here versus there and so forth) characterize much of the contemporary border
discourse. Many of these binary distinctions have been brought about, as Rumford (2006: 155)
contends, by a renewed theoretical focus on the changing nature of borders originating from many of
the themes central to contemporary social theory, including globalization, cosmopolitanism,
networked communities, mobilities and flows. Parker and Vaughan-Williams (2009: 584) in citing
Derrida (1976) locate the seduction of binaries in their ability to produce a sense of security and
certainty (pure imaginaries).Such debates unfold in several zero-sum arguments related to governing
borders, including (1) security versus economy, (2) open borders versus closed borders, (3) separating
a coherent inside from a chaotic outside and (4) borders as geospatially specific versus borders as
virtual or diffused. The first three binaries fall apart for two primary reasons. Firstly, recent literature
suggests that border policies have moved towards coupling security and economic concerns not in
opposition but rather as a mutually reinforcing (and indistinguishable) pair in the form of the security–
economy nexus (see e.g. Coleman 2005; Sparke 2006; Lalonde 2012; Ashby 2014; Leese 2016). Secondly,
and relatedly, the nearly universal acceptance in border literature that risk has come to dominate
border policing and mobility governance efforts (see e.g. Muller 2010a, 2011; Aas 2011; Amoore 2013;
Broeders and Hampshire 2013), means binaries as well as distinctions like ‘open’ versus ‘closed’ are
replaced by the governance of flows via data, which presupposes circulation.The fourth binary
requires closer examination. The assertion that borders have moved beyond the territorial limits of
the sovereign state is well supported in the literature (i.e. Mountz 2011; Broeders and Hampshire
2013; Salter and Mutlu 2013). For instance, Broeders and Hampshire (2013) discuss the contemporary
digitization of the border as a refinement of the logic of ‘remote control’, in which ‘states project their
immigration control measures overseas so that they identify and process would-be immigrants well
before they arrive at the territorial border’ (p. 1202). Through such digitization, associated security
and control technologies as forms of governance have spread away from physical borders, and
borders are said to experience a concomitant shift from territorial boundaries of states to a
potentially infinite number of sites (Broeders and Hampshire 2013: 1207).The debate surrounding
deterritorialization of borders is ultimately an uneasy one. While Lyon (2005) (in)famously declares ‘the
border is everywhere’, Vaughan-Williams (2010), for instance, concludes that the ‘offshoring’ of
borders and security does not necessarily eradicate ‘commonsensical geographical notions about the
location of borders’ (p. 1074). Vaughan-Williams demonstrates this by exploring the UK’s configuration
of the border as part of a ‘security continuum’ that accommodates the continued use of physical
borders alongside other enforcement locales. Others (Rumford 2006; de Lint 2008) point to the physical
border as an important site of ‘security performances’ for states wishing to display to their citizenry
that they have control over the flow of people and goods into and out of a state. In essence then, this
literature contends that physical borders serve at the very least as sites for ‘security theatre’ (Schneier
2006: 38 as cited in Zedner 2009: 22) in the form of ritualistic shows (or acts) of security.Ultimately, it
can be concluded that the interdisciplinary study of borders falls into what Agnew (1994) refers to as
the ‘territorial trap’, or ‘the set of geographical assumptions that have combined to obscure the
historicity and mutability of political space and territory’ (Walters 2006a: 141). In other words, the
interdisciplinary obsession with border geospatiality has served to obscure research focused on other
aspects of borders and security.

The regulation and expansion of global regimes of mobility renders the positions of
migrants in terms of institutional biometrics which produces a mobility underclass
subject to exclusion and deportation
Salter, Professor at the School of Political Studies, University of Ottawa, 2006 (Mark B., “The Global
Visa Regime and the Political Technologies of the International Self: Borders, Bodies, Biopolitics,”
Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 31, Google Scholar, Accessed 7/9/18 GDI-GN
I agree with Koslowski that mobility is a better description of the field of social relations than the more
restrictive migration— Mark B. Salter 175 which is why I talk about a global mobility regime and try to
understand the system of tourist, business, and settler trajectories .41 Simon Dalby has suggested ways in
which mobility has become a luxury of the rich and developed populations, while fixity has become an
encumbrance of the poor.42 Bauman discusses a politics of exclusion, which draws substantial interest toward
the notion of rejection: “The mark of excluded in an era of time/space compression is enforced immobility.”43 Generally, states
issue settlement and temporary visas, which are distinguished by the length of stay and degree of
integration into the host community (often in terms of labor/taxes). Thus settlers are allowed to work and must
contribute to the tax system; visitors are not allowed to work and need not contribute to the tax
system. Hollifield suggests the delocalization of border functions acts as a solution to the problem of
liberal rights.44 To preclude asylum seekers from claiming rights inherent in the liberal community ,
decisions are made outside of the state where no such appeal can be claimed. We may see this dynamic in
European discourse wherein refugees and economic migrants have been recast as asylum seekers and the
attempts to locate camps at the margins of the European community .45 The United States, on the
other hand, uses “expedited removal,” a process by which a traveler with false travel documents is refused entry
and barred entry for five years. Expedited removal is not subject to judicial or administrative appeal.46 The “voluntary departure”
program at the US/Mexico border illustrates the power of the bureaucracy to condition marginalized
migrants to give up their rights: “Arrested aliens are permitted (indeed, encouraged) to waive their rights to a
deportation hearing and return to Mexico without lengthy detention, expensive bonding, and trial.”47 In each of these cases,
rights of applicants are suspended at the border of the community as an exceptional case of normal law. Preliminary empirical work
suggests that there are a number of common requirements for visas: a fee for processing (a remote tax);
return tickets (good faith illustration that the applicant’s stay is temporary); statement of qualifications (to distinguish
the degree of skilled labor); funds for stay; a health certificate (declarations that one is not an epidemiological risk: AIDS/HIV;
yellow fever; tuberculosis; etc.); and affirmation of acceptable behavior (declarations that one is not a criminal/felon). Thus,
the mobile subject is configured by the receiving state in terms of health, wealth, labor/leisure, and
risk. The guarantee of the passport is its isomorphic representation of a particular body to a set of
governmental records. The visa application, which always tests and depends on the 176 The Global Visa
Regime: Borders, Bodies, Biopolitics validity of the passport, attempts to render the position of the applicant in
terms of state, educational, health, and police institutions . As Don Flynn has suggested, the product of the visa
bureaucracy is rejection, and efficiency is determined by rates of rejection against some imagined
norm of regularly occurring fraud.48

The process of immigration denationalizes the migrant and forces them to embrace
obedience and conformity to the sovereign, subjecting them to a continual state of
exception wherein rights and protections are withheld
Salter, Professor at the School of Political Studies, University of Ottawa, 2006 (Mark B., “The Global
Visa Regime and the Political Technologies of the International Self: Borders, Bodies, Biopolitics,”
Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 31, Google Scholar, Accessed 7/9/18 GDI-GN

Through the passport, the sovereign who claims one’s allegiance asks for entry and protection on behalf
of the possessor; Mark B. Salter 169 thus entry to the body politic is mediated through the administrative bodies
of the sovereigns.14 Entry to a sovereign state in which one does not possess nationality is mediated
through the visa process and identity papers (passport, refugee, or stateless travel documents). While
the discussion of individual attachment or allegiance to the state/sovereign is usually understood as
citizenship or nationality, I would argue in the face of material facts on the ground and ethical concerns
prompted by the political consequences of those facts that we must widen our analytical scope to
include a multiplicity of forms of membership in political communities.15 Jean Bodin defines this important
boundary of the political community: “The mutual obligation between subject and sovereign, by which,
in return for the faith and obedience rendered to him the sovereign must do justice and give counsel, assistance,
encouragement, and protection to the subject. He does not owe this to aliens .”16 At this stage, it is important to
note that the sovereign decision of inclusion/expulsion is irreducible and that the space of decision is
also a space of exception. The bordering process constituted by the decision to include/exclude is a
dialogue between body and body politic requiring the confession of all manner of bodily, economic,
and social information. Borrowing from Alison Mountz, we might speak of the “long tunnel” of in-between spaces that is constituted
by international travel. The gangway between the airplane and the agent of customs precisely resembles the
“camp.”17 The traveler is not simply in between states, but also denationalized. It is useful to return
to the anthropologist’s categorization of “threshold rites” to understand the process of the border. According to
Arnold van Gennep, for example, the territorial passage is divided into three specific rites: pre-liminal rites
(the rites of separation from a previous world); liminal or threshold rites (rites of transition); and post-
liminal rites (rites and ceremonies of incorporation into the new world).18 The preliminal rites are ones of
denationalization, status that is held in abeyance before the sovereign decision . “Whoever entered the
camp moved in a zone of indistinction between outside and inside, exception and rule, licit and illicit ,
in which the very concepts of subjective right and juridical protection no longer made any sense .”19 The
liminal rite of examination, obedience, and confession presents a challenge to Agamben . The
sovereign in his account has no restraints and may simply exert the power of decision. The border-
crosser challenges this in several ways: the decision to include/exclude is individual and institutional ,
and the border-crosser presents him/herself to the sovereign , and this element of agency is totally neglected by
Agamben.

Any claims about how inclusion reverses biopolitics fails--anything short of complete
deconstruction of border surveillance systems ensures that some bodies are
subjugated
Ayse Ceyhan, political scientist teaching at Sciences Po Paris, 04- 2012, "Surveillance as Biopower,"
Routledge Handbooks https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9780203814949.ch1_1_c -
GDI JM

With this concept, Foucault reversed the emphasis on the threat of death characterizing the ancient
times at the expense of the protection of life and initiated the problematic of taking life (body, health,
sexuality, race) as the focal object for governing population’s and individuals’ self and social life which
he pursued in his lectures at the Collège de France in terms of biopolitics of security and security
technologies (Foucault 2004). The baseline assumption is that power focuses on the population by
presupposing indi- viduals as living subjects, and politics is essentially all about efficient techniques of
estimating the fertility of territories and the health and movements of the population (ibid.). For
Foucault, security and biopower are intimately interrelated in that the biopoliticized problematic of
security deals with an object that is constantly transforming and revolving around “the economy of
the contingent” (Foucault 1976: 47), “the regulation of circulation and the promotion of reproductive
powers and potentials of life” (ibid.: 16-20; 44; 45). The Foucauldian conception of security is broad and
comprises several meanings. Different from discipline which is exercised on pre-determined individuals,
security is exercised on an entire population of individuals for managing their life, health, psychology
and behaviors. It refers to different meanings regarding whether it is exercised in terms of series of
mobile elements and events, or in terms of milieu as the space in which circulation occurs (Foucault
2004: 22). The notions of circulation and milieu are central to the Foucauldian analysis of liberal
regimes (Foucault 2004: Lessons 1, 3, 13). Circulation is the space of the operations of human beings
and defines the prin- ciple of organization of modern biopolitics. Foucault looked at circulation both in
terms of town planning and the circulation of commerce, networks, goods, ideas and orders. Moreover,
the problematic of circu- lation includes both the freeing of circulation and also more generally the
suppression of the dangerous, the problem of “differentiating good circulation from bad circulation,”
maximizing the first one at the expense of the second (ibid.: 20). It then comprises the surveillance of
dangerous populations such as “all floating populations, beggars, vagrants, delinquents, criminals,
thieves, murderers” (ibid.). Milieu is basically the regulative space of circulation. Foucault borrowed this
notion from mechanics and biology after his reading of Canguilhem and Lamarck as the space in which
populations are secured from death on the basis of their collective life, health and environment. It is the
imaginary and real enclosure in which certain species not only are present, but can grow and prosper.
Milieu is what is needed to account for action at a distance of one body on another (Foucault 2004: 20)
and a set of natural givens, rivers, marshes, hills and a set of artificial givens and agglomerations of
individuals’ houses (ibid.: 22, 23). The milieu is the constant entanglement of a geographical, climatic
and physical with human species as it has a body and a soul, a moral and physical existence (ibid.: 24).
Circulation is the principle of ordering of movements and interactions which can be put in series of
indefinite number of events such as the number of boats that dock at the wharf or trucks that are
coming to the city, etc. These series comprise indefinite numbers of units like houses, people, goods that
pile up. Security is then the management of such kinds of open series which therefore can only be
controlled by an estimate of probabilities (ibid.: 22). In Security, Territory, Population (2004 [2007])
Foucault examined the different meanings security is invested with. These meanings go from the sense
security was given in relation to sovereignty and terri- toriality to the meaning it held with the
advances of liberalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, He then arrived to consider security
as the statistical modeling of dangerous and/or risky behavior and the normalization that this modeling
generates for populations (Lectures 1, 2 and 3). In his endeavor, he also specified that security is not
limited to the protection of the territory but centrifugal; widening constantly its scope to include more
events such as production, psychology, behaviors, etc. (Foucault 2004: 46). This reading of security is still
relevant today as we witness the broadening of security focal objects to new and unexpected objects
like the body parts, personal information, biography and data. Such mutation is gen- erated with the
transformations of violence, the new forms it has taken, and also with changes in science, technology
and knowledge like the discovery of DNA and the production of cutting-edge security technologies such
as biometrics, face-recognition technologies, intelligent tracking systems and the whole computerization
and digitization processes. These technologies are characterized by their pervasiveness as they are not
just tools for security agencies but invade the daily life of individuals. Not only are they part of the public
space (as with camera surveillance) but they also participate in the securitization of individuals’
computers, data, luggage or houses. Moreover, some of them, like biometrics, participate in the
regulation of individuals’ health as they are intensively used in ophthalmology and endocrinology. In this
chapter surveillance is considered as a political technology of population management. As the vast
literature produced by surveillance studies indicates surveillance is an old activity that has existed as
long as humans have existed and interacted with each other (Lyon 2006). In modern times it had been
intimately connected with the regulation of the capitalist society and the modernization of the army
and the nation- state. According to the Foucauldian problematic of biopoliticized security, surveillance
can be understood as the very form of liberal governmentality seeking maximum efficiency for the
regulation of bodies and species. It is an activity undertaken both by governments and institutions and
even by the subjects them- selves against each other. Regarding governmental forms of
governmentality, according to Foucault, the idea that government should intervene in society means
that the population should be managed and even remediated or improved to ensure its members can
participate productively in the market.

Borders are everywhere

Lalonde, Professor in the Department of Sociology and Legal Studies 2017 [Patrick,
“Cyborg Work: Borders as Simulation,” The British Journal of Criminology azx070,
https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azx070] GDI-CL

Much of the contemporary literature in the interdisciplinary field of border studies has focused
attention on the changing nature of borders from several contexts. These shifts have been well
documented in relation to the Canadian, United States, and European literature in terms of the
following: (1) the development of ‘smart borders’ (see Amoore et al. 2008; Côté-Boucher 2008),
including examinations of travel documents (Salter 2004, 2006; Sparke 2006; Lyon 2009; Salter 2011;
McPhail et al. 2012) and the use of biometrics and other risk technologies (Amoore 2006; Broeders
2007; Muller 2009; 2010a; 2011); (2) examinations of border geospatiality (or lack thereof), including
employment of logics of ‘remote control’ (Broeders and Hampshire 2013), deterritorialization (Muller
2010a; Mountz 2011; Salter and Mutlu 2013), the border as ‘everywhere’ (Lyon 2005), the border as
part of a continuum also including other enforcement locales (Vaughan-Williams 2010), and as a form
of visual ‘security performance’ (Rumford 2006; de Lint 2008) pushing security functions ‘beyond the
border’ away from their traditional geographical limits; and (3) the securitization of refugees, irregular
migrants, and citizenship (see e.g. Bigo 2002; Coutin 2005; Dauvergne 2007; Hyndman and Mountz
2008; Salter 2008; Coutin 2010; Duffield 2010; McNevin 2010).Various binary debates as well as
metaphors have been employed in the literature to attempt to explore borders theoretically while also
incorporating the aforementioned disparate findings. Such metaphors have conceptualized borders as
‘filters’ (Muller 2011) and as ‘firewalls’ (Walters 2006a). This article will argue that these metaphors
have varying levels of success in avoiding pitfalls associated with the aforementioned literature, namely
being unable to reconcile debates in the literature surrounding binary border mandates as well as
opposing geographical imaginaries. Border binaries also fail in incorporating previous findings related
to a harmonized security–economy nexus, notions of risk, and also fall into a ‘territorial trap’ (Agnew
1994) that only serves to obscure other research. This article ultimately proposes a revised theory and
metaphor for contemporary border governance towards producing a representation more consistent
with what is presently known (and agreed upon) in the field of borders and border security. The works
of Baudrillard (1981) on simulation and Bogard (1996) on the simulation of surveillance will be especially
instructive. By performing a content analysis of border training documents and manuals obtained via
Access to Information and Privacy (ATIP) requests filed with Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA),
this article will carry forward the argument that borders proceed as simulations, reducing personal
narrative to binary data that allow for the governance of mobility and flows via risk within societies of
control (Deleuze 1992), while also making borders transmutable anywhere social life is securitized
irrespective of considerations of time and/or space.
 Inclusion = Abandonment
The affirmative is just another example of the Prevention through Deterrence border
strategy by which the US deems some worthy of immigrating while dehumanizing
others
Lewis Dowle,, 11-27-2017, "Spaces of Exception and Refusal? The Borderzone of Mexico/US," E-International Relations, http://www.e-
ir.info/2017/11/27/spaces-of-exception-and-refusal-the-borderzone-of-mexico-us/

Since the 1990s, the borderzone has become a space of exception through the enforcement of the US
strategy of ‘Prevention through Deterrence’ (Coleman, 2007; Doty, 2007). Through deterrence, this
policy seeks to quell the number of migrants attempting to cross the border, directing migratory paths
through deserts and allowing ‘nature [to] take its course’ (Doty, 2011). Powerful discourse pertaining
to securitisation legitimises these extremities and (re)writes the modern Mexico/US borderzone
(Ackleson, 2005; Nevins, 2007). The scripts utilised in the branding of such migrants has evolved from a
threat to local jobs to the breach of national security (Ackleson, 2005; Purcell & Nevins, 2005). To
enforce their sovereignty, the US could not afford to be inattentive to the unparalleled level of
migration, therefore action was deemed necessary (Andreas, 1996). This policy to defend the Homeland
Security renders migrants as bare life, with states wielding their weapons of sovereignty and biopower
(Doty, 2011; Sparke, 2006). Though not absolutely sealed, this borderzone serves as a ‘moral alibi’,
determining nature to blame for deaths (Doty, 2011). These areas develop into ‘killing fields’, with the
state of exception becoming the rule, the material realisation of Agamben’s Camp (Doty, 2011).
Coleman (2007) contests that the spatiality regarding this Camp is not limited to the borderzone, but
that it is relocating into America’s interior. Thus Coleman takes a nuanced reflection asserting that
border enforcement therefore becomes increasingly everywhere (Coleman, 2007). Building on
Coleman’s observations, two further reflections can be drawn. Firstly, the nature of ‘Prevention
through Deterrence’ is applicable to US immigration policy beyond the Mexico/US borderzone.
Deterrence is present in the media, witnessed in the scripts of politicians and citizens across the nation.
Racial discourse deters those who do not represent the traditional American. Secondly, the prevention
can be seen to increase this occurrence. Undocumented migrants from Mexico (and elsewhere) desire
for greater standards of living which the US is perceived to possess. The bare life of the economically
inactive are rejected, with the elite of society only welcoming in Foucault’s homo economicus (Sparke,
2006). This very act of prevention to the economically less able re-enforces the dominance of the US
economy.
 Citizenship
The notion of citizenship requires the exclusion of non-citizens intrinsic to sovereign
power and perpetuates violence
Astor 2009 [Avi, phD in Socio at UMich, Unauthorized Immigration, Securitization, and the Making of
Operation Wetback, 5/29, Latino Studies, Palgrave Journals]

Bare life is life that is excluded from the political order. The relation of bare life to the political order,
however, is not purely a relation of exteriority. Rather, bare life is the "zone of indistinction" in which
political life and natural life "constitute each other in including and excluding each other" (p. 90).
Citizenship, the lynchpin of the modern political order, would be meaningless without the presence,
whether real or imaginary, of non-citizens. But the role played by non-citizens in constituting the
political order is contingent on their exclusion from this order. Agamben sees this exclusive logic as the
fatal flaw of the modern nation-state, and attributes the myriad abuses suffered by refugees and
denaturalized subjects during the last two centuries to its immanent unfolding. The utility of
Agamben's insights derive from their uncanny ability to highlight both the constitutive role that
politically marginalized populations play in shaping the modern political order and the logic of their
exclusion from this order. They are not excluded simply by virtue of being non-citizens, refugees or
stateless persons, but by virtue of being the embodiment of pure life itself, which has no place in the
modern political order when decoupled from political existence. Scholars must be cautious, however,
not to lose sight of the fact that Agamben's analysis of bare life emerged from his analysis of specific
European events, most notably the Holocaust, and therefore may miss unique aspects of the
experiences of racism and exclusion in non-European contexts. Hesse (2004), for instance, argues that
Agamben's conception of racism is "Eurocentric," as it defines racism as a "relation of exception" and
consequently overlooks the ways in which racism is built into social institutions. Taking the Holocaust as
the ideal-typical case of biopolitical exclusion, Hesse writes, obscures other experiences of racist
exclusion that cannot be assimilated into this paradigm.

The existence of homo sacer is fundamental to citizenship rights and makes

concentration camps possible
Ellerman 9 [Antje, Dept of Politics @ U of British Columbia, Undocumented Migrants and Resistance in
the State of Exception, p 2-4, http://www.unc.edu/euce/eusa2009/papers/ellermann_02G.pdf]

Giorgio Agamben’s seminal work on the relationship between the individual and the sovereign state is
anchored in the concepts of “homo sacer” and “state of exception.” Homo sacer, a figure of Roman law,
embodies what Agamben terms “bare” or “depoliticized” life (1998). Under Roman law, a man
convicted of certain crimes was banished from society and stripped of his rights as a citizen. Drawing on
Hannah Arendt’s description of the “naked life” of the refugee (Arendt 1973), Agamben juxtaposes the
bare life of homo sacer who subsists in zones of exclusion and rightlessness with the citizen’s
“politicized” and rights-based life. The existence of homo sacer is central to Agamben’s understanding
of sovereign power because the possibility of rights-stripping reveals a schism between the
individual’s biological existence, on the one hand, and her political life, on the other. Reduced to bare,
or biological, life, the refugee is rendered politically insignificant. Agamben elaborates on this
relationship between sovereign power and bare life in his historical treatise State of Exception (2005).
The notion of state of exception reflects the augmentation of government powers during times of
emergency when state sovereignty is perceived to be under threat. In states of emergency,
governments suspend elements of the normal legal order and strip individuals of the rights that mark
politicized life. The state of exception is thus the ultimate expression of state sovereignty as the power
to proclaim the emergency and suspend the operation of law. Agamben’s understanding of life in the
state of exception reflects a conception of rights as fundamentally grounded in the institution of
national citizenship. Following Arendt, Agamben rejects the notion that human rights are viable outside
the confines of membership in the nation-state. Instead, “the so-called sacred and inalienable human
rights are revealed to be without any protection precisely when it is no longer possible to conceive of
them as rights of the citizens of a state” (1998, 126). Accordingly, it is those excluded from citizenship—
the refugee, the stateless person, the illegal migrant—who most fundamentally represent bare life in
the exception. In Agamben’s work, the zone of exception is most clearly embodied in the detention
center and (concentration) camp. In State of Exception, Agamben treats the detention center at
Guantanamo Bay not only as the exception’s incarnation, but also as a case whose exceptionalism
surpasses that of comparable zones of exclusion: “What is new about President Bush’s order [of
November 13, 2001] is that it radically erases any legal status of the individual, thus producing a legally
unnamable an unclassifiable being. Not only do the Taliban captured in Afghanistan not enjoy the status
of POWs as defined by the Geneva Convention, they do not even have the status of persons charged
with a crime according to American law. Neither prisoners nor persons accused, but simply “detainees,”
they are the object of a pure de facto rule, of a detention that is indefinite not only in the temporal
sense but in its very nature as well, since it is entirely removed form the law and from judicial
oversight.” (2005, 4-5) Agamben’s description of bare life in Guantanamo thus suggests that the denial
of citizenship rights not only deprives individuals of the prospect of ever leaving behind bare life, but the
related denial of a legal identity completely strips homo sacer of any state protection whatsoever.
 Border-as-Line
Borders inhabit the interiors and exteriors of states, imposing the myth of a sovereign
state despite the dispersed and encompassing nature of borders
Salter, Professor at the School of Political Studies, University of Ottawa, 2012 (Mark B., “Theory of
the / : The Suture and Critical Border Studies,” Geopolitics, Vol. 17, Iss. 4, October, EBSCO, Accessed
7/10/18 GDI-GN)

Traditionally, borders drew the line between the safe spaces of the political from the dangerous
anarchy of the international (regardless of the objective threats faced in either of these realms). However, separate from the
empirical challenges to this simplistic notion of borders that we can marshal, there is a more elemental weakness to this
trope: “There are no simple lines, no zones of zero width, between insides and outsides, even when
exceptions are declared ... the outside is always somehow inside, the inside somehow outside, whether in
diagnoses of life supposed within modernity, or in diagnoses of life between modernity or that which is supposedly outside. Limits simply
cannot work politically if they are hermetically sealed.”29 And, Hermes is an apt patron: messenger to the Greek
pantheon, the god of boundaries, travellers, and strangers – noted for oration, persuasion, charm and change. The suture better represents this
messaging, transition, implication between the inside and the outside. Theory of the / 739 Individuals see the world as a
pleasing or dystopian organisation of population, territory, and responsibility . The grand narrative of
sovereignty resolves pressing questions about identity, ethics, and community . However, as an individual
crosses between sovereign states – the border, the airport, the colonies, the refugee camp, the processing centre,
the interstitial spaces of Guantanamo Bay, Guam, Diego Garcia, etc. – there is a displacement within the grand narrative of
clearly demarcated, exhaustive, and ethical sovereign states that manage their relations according to law and force.
Everyday life within states renders these fundamental questions about boundaries obscure or hidden ,
but when an individual crosses that border, the assumptions about belonging, identity, sovereignty,
territory, law and force are suddenly apparent .30 These interstices are the abject of the global: the disgusting
surplus of the sovereign regime that lays bare the colonial legacy of contemporary globalisation and
the undercurrent of force that troubles the smooth water of authority . The grand narrative falters, and
seems not simply arbitrary but radically unstable: why are there states, borders, sovereignty – how do I, the traveller, fit into this
world of sovereign states? The use of film theory can be instructive, as Debrix, Dittmer, Shapiro, Weber and others demonstrate.31 Suturing
is the description of the process of stitching the audience into a film – whether through editorial
representations of the camera-as-eye or narratively through sympathy with a character. Debrix
connects the suture in Lacanian psychoanalysis to Althusserian interpellation, and in particular the trick that
the suture explains: the subject is not present on the screen or in the discourse about the world, but “may allow
himself/herself to be fooled by the apparatus.” 32 Žižek explains: The signifying structure has to includes its own absence:
the very opposition between the symbolic order and its absence has to be inscribed within this order (orig.,), and ‘suture’ designates the point
of this inscription.33 Sovereign
states need to stich in subjects to the narrative of the state, precisely at the
moment when they are most exposed to its decision and in greatest vulnerability of being abandoned
by it. Individual border crossers internalise the discourse of the sovereign state, its possibility, its
stability and its promise of protection, at the very moment that the sovereign state seems impossible.

Conceptualizing borders as inclusion vs. exclusion, interior vs. exterior fails to realize
the mobile nature of sovereign power, reaffirms the view of borders as concrete lines
Salter, Professor at the School of Political Studies, University of Ottawa, 2012 (Mark B., “Theory of
the / : The Suture and Critical Border Studies,” Geopolitics, Vol. 17, Iss. 4, October, EBSCO, Accessed
7/10/18 GDI-GN)
The line has been the dominant thinking tool of border studies . Take Williams’ recent book, which starts:
“The line in the sand ... possesses many of the characteristics we tend to associate with territorial
borders in Theory of the / 737 international politics. This idea is a powerful one, so powerful, in fact, that it is often taken for
granted.”16 Even when borders are taken to be multiplying or multiplicitous, the dominant metaphor remains
the line and in particular the performative nature of the line to divide : “No political border is more
natural or real than another. Rather, all borders are human constructions and as such derive their function and
meaning from the people they divide.”17 Newman is one of the most important traditional border theorists , and he
argues that “this transition from the study of the line per se to the social and spatial functions of those
lines as constructs that define the nature of inclusiveness and exclusiveness , which would appear to characterize
the contemporary debate concerning boundaries and borders.”18 Even when Bigo imaginatively uses the topological metaphor of the torus, it
relies upon the line: “This cylindrical model benefits from extreme simplicity in the representation of in the alignment between inside,
internal ... and outside, external ... all is resolved on the borderline of the state, a line as thin as possible, a no-man’s land, a paper line, a line of
sovereignty.”19 But the
idea of the border as a line is under increasing empirical and theoretical pressure.20
When borders are represented as lines, the analytical focus becomes the two sides of the line, what is
divided or crossed or transgressed , rather than the system in which that line can have meaning. Sassen
traces the circuits of authority and rights within a territorial frame to demonstrate that while “the nation-state
remains the prevalent organizational source of authority and to variable extents the dominant one ...
critical components of authority deployed in the making of the territorial state are shifting toward become strong capabilities for detaching that
authority from its exclusive territory and onto multiple bordering systems.”21 Globalisation and the disaggregation of
territory, authority, and rights then becomes about the disjunction between lines . But, the globe in
Sassen’s model is simply the container for states, rather than a constitutive system of systems :
borders then are the functional divisions between different appeals to authority, rather than a way of
structuring the condition of possibility for authority at all. Similarly, Balibar’s treatment of borders focuses entirely on the inside.
Borders, he argues are overdetermined, polysemic, and heterogenous .22 We cannot disagree that “no political
border is ever the mere boundary between two states, but it is always overdetermined and, in that sense,
sanctioned, reduplicated, and relativized by other geopolitical divisions”; that borders “do not have the same meaning for
everyone”; or that “some borders are no longer situated at the borders at all.”23 Rather we say that this entirely internal focus
structurally limits the possible insights available from this schema because the line is not a processual
or systemic metaphor. For Balibar, the outside is individualised through citizenship status, race, class or
gender, not the outside of an international system itself . Brown’s analysis, on the other hand, attempts to juxtapose the
processes of supposed debordering due to globalisation with a resurgent practice in the construction of physical walls, the reinforcing of 738
Mark B. Salter lines. Because
“the migration, smuggling, crime, terror, and even political purposes that walls
would interdict are rarely state sponsored, nor, for the most part, are they incited by national interests... . they appear
as signs of a post-Westphalian world”24 However much we are sympathetic with Brown’s use of psychoanalytic theory to
understand the impulse to wall, the relentlessly externalised focus structurally limits the possible insights, when the international is entirely
untheorised or empirically described as simply a realm of danger.25 Each of these theorists strain the metaphor of the line past its breaking
point: the
line simply does not provide analytical purchase on the functions of inclusion and exclusion or
the co-constitution of the inside and outside. Critical border studies have largely abandoned the line
as its dominant.26 In particular, there has been a shift away from legalistic boundary drawing and cross-
border economic trends towards the performativity of the border, the ways that borders are given meaning through
practices. This encompasses work done on border zones and cross-border regions, and also multiple borders, such as within the European
Union or other integrating regions. Others in geography have turned to Bauman and Castells, using hydraulic
metaphors of flows and networks, and argued for “networked borders .”27 Analytical focus has shifted from the
line – written on a map or on a landscape – towards the policies and populations that are defined and cross those borders. Vaughan-
Williams advocates for the analytical frame of a “generalized biopolitical border” in which the
sovereign power to include and exclude is, essentially, mobile and dispersed and focused on the body.28
This article models the “/” between inside/outside: the sovereign border read as a suture remedies
the solipsistic tendencies to view borders either exclusively as internal or external.
 Securitization
Law enforcement at the border constructs the immigrant as the enemy within and
produces shadow populations isolated from the citizenry
Goldstein, Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University, and Alonso-Bejarano, doctoral
candidate in Women s and Gender Studies, at Rutgers University, 2017

(Daniel M., Carolina, “E-Terrify: Securitized Immigration and Biometric Surveillance in the Workplace,”
Human Organization; Oklahoma City Vol. 76, Iss. 1, Spring 2017, Proquest, Accessed 7/7/18 GDI-GN)

In the context of securitized immigration, laws like IRCA and programs like Secure Communities cannot be
understood simply as expressions of the geopolitical policing and disciplining of the flux of bodies across
mapped space. Rather, such legal mechanisms, like the E-Verify program that followed, are more appropriately understood as
biopolitical technologies in societies of control (Coleman and Stuesse 2014; Deleuze 1992). They are regulatory apparatuses
through which the everyday lives of people--but especially immigrants of color--are subjectivized for
intervention and management, biometrically selected for detention and deportation (Gold 2012), and
disposed of for the purification and well-being of the social body . Such programs reinforce what Amoore
(2006:337) calls the "biometric border," a dual-sided phenomenon that refers to the development of " digital
technologies, data integration, and managerial expertise in the politics of border management; [as well as]
the exercise of biopower such that the [immigrant] body itself is inscribed with , and demarcates, a continual
crossing of multiple encoded borders -social, legal, gendered, racialized, and so on." The biometric border is constantly redefining
what Bigo (2001:112) calls the "Mobius ribbon" of securitization, where the biopolitical and the necropolitical
coincide; a new paradigm where "internal and external security become embedded in the figure of the
'enemy within', of the outsider inside, increasingly labeled with the catchphrase 'immigrant.'" Through a "new politics of
surveillance" (Levi and Wall 2004), the biometric border as a technique of regulation identifies the
undocumented immigrant as its primary target for subjectification. It produces the "shadow
populations" described above, communities largely separated from the surrounding world and
characterized by heightened levels of fear and anxiety. Inda (2013) cites data from the Pew Hispanic Center survey, in
which United States Latinos (and Latino immigrants in particular) report being harassed by the police on a regular
basis, feeling victimized and persecuted by the dominant anti-immigrant discourse in the United States, and
generally anxious that they, a family member, or a close friend might be deported. Programs like Secure Communities
exacerbate those feelings, and though immigration officials might claim otherwise, it is clear that this
is a deliberate intention of these programs' authors (Gilbert 2009). Policies and programs that target immigrants within the
United States are not only aimed at deterring other immigrants from coming into the country, they are also, as Inda (2013:302) puts it, "about
incapacitation and attrition. Indeed, the
creation of insecurity among immigrants-through depriving them of the
ability to participate meaningfully in quotidian life-appears to be a willful production designed to
isolate this population from society and render them utterly powerless." E-Verify contributes significantly to this effort, as we explore
in the next section.

Border walls function as symbolic and semiotic responses to crises produced by

eroded sovereign state efforts to secure territory
Jones et al., professor in the Department of Geography at UH Mānoa, 2017 (Reece,
Corey Johnson, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Gabriel Popescu, Indiana University South
Bend, Alison Mountz, Balsillie School of International Affairs, Wilfrid Laurier University, “Interventions on
the state of sovereignty at the border,” Political Geography, pg.s 1-4, July, 2017, Research Gate,
Accessed 7/10/18, GDI-JV)

Recent events have put human encounters with state sovereignty at borders under intense scrutiny
from governments, media, and academics alike. Over 40,000 people died attempting to cross a border from 2006 to 2015
and a record 65 million people were displaced by conflict around the world in 2015 (http:// missingmigrants.iom.int/). These 40,000 þ
deaths are not the direct results of wars where humans become the casualties of state-to-state
conflicts or internal strife. Rather, they are a consequence of states expanding the reach of their
security and detention practices to capture, intercede, or make intentionally perilous the movements
of people in search of better opportunities or often just basic safety and human dignity for themselves
and their family. There are almost 70 border walls around the world, up from 15 in 1989 (Vallet, 2014), and these are just the most
visible physical manifestations of what is much wider set of state practices to control movement such as deployments of more border guards,
seaborne patrols, and investments in new technologies to monitor more comprehensively events within state space, at the edges of their
territories, and beyond. These proactive and reactive exercises of state power mirror, and likely also help stir
up, nationalist political rhetoric that emphasizes the rights of the in-group of citizens at the expense of
noncitizens. The election of Donald Trump as the President of the United States, who called for
finishing the wall on the US-Mexico border and banning Muslim immigration, and the Brexit vote in
the United Kingdom that was fueled by a fear of migrants and a desire for more national control over
economic decisions are but two examples of anti-migration sentiments seeping into mainstream
politics. Against this backdrop, and inspired by recent scholarship in political geography, political science, and border studies, these
interventions spatialize the sovereignty of the state at the border by considering how scholars should
interpret the global expansion of security infrastructure ranging from new walls to the deployment of
drones and military hardware to monitor and secure space. The interdisciplinary group of scholars was asked to
intervene on the question: What is the state of sovereignty at the border? The common thread throughout the intervention is that while
borderlands and borderlines remain significant, a series of new locations what we term corridors,
camps, and spaces of confinement have emerged as key sites to understand the practice of
sovereignty through borderwork. The first common theme is the emergence of new corridors where
people on the move use technologies to subvert authority and survive the transit through dangerous
and unwelcoming places, while the presence of state and non-state actors funnel people to particular routes. As Polly Pallister-Wilkins
argues in her contribution, non-governmental aid organizations are increasingly implicated in humanitarian
borderwork, which produces the border at multiple scales of sovereignty as individuals and
organizations shape the spatial extent of the state. Similarly, Emily Gilbert's contribution details the role of individuals and
organizations that create corridors through which resettled refugees find their way to Canada. Just as states and affiliated
organizations attempt to impose sovereign control over people on the move, people use new
corridors and informal camps to refuse to submit to sovereign state control. Recent work has placed emphasis
on the growing digital divide in this case between the digitization of human life through what Gabriel Popescu in his contribution calls “a portal-
like logic” of border busting digital technologies on the one hand, and the persistently territorialized spatialization of sovereign state power on
the other. Witness refugees’ negotiation of border controls by means of GPS, Facebook, and crowdsourcing in Southeastern Europe and you
have a good sense of the “non-linear territorial logics” that make this refugee crisis so different than past ones, albeit with similarly all-too-
frequent tragic outcomes. Alison Mountz's contribution points to another new location of borderwork: camps on islands. Mountz echoes
Lauren Benton’s (2010) work on the practice of sovereignty during the period of European Colonization, which was not a uniform expansion of
colonial sovereign control, but rather a fragmented and piecemeal effort characterized by nodes of power emplaced in settlements, islands, and
sea lanes. Contemporary border enforcement and mobility management increasingly happen in a similarly uneven geographical configuration
of island camps and corridors where movement occurs and where the practice of sovereignty is tactically intensified to manage flows of
humans through space. Wendy Brown's groundbreaking book Walled States, Waning Sovereignty argued that the walls and fences
that were built in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were not necessarily a
sign of strength and state power, but a last vestige of a dying system of territorially bounded
sovereignty (Brown, 2010). Since the publication of the book, events have occasioned a rethinking of the significance of walls. In her
contribution, she still sees a symbolic value in the construction of walls at the edges of sovereign territory, but points to a new geography of
migration that focuses on spaces of confinement shaped by government management, non-government organizations, and the agency of
people on the move. The
interventions that follow spatialize the sovereignty of the state: locating and
interrogating the sites of new sovereign practices, identifying the individuals and organizations acting
as the sovereign agents of the state, and finding space for agency in encounters between people on
the move and the state. They investigate different aspects of how the management of migration is creating
corridors, camps, and spaces of confinement, but they also identify new spaces of connections where
migration is structured by the state, often through the medium of non-state actors, and where people
on the move have the ability to shape their encounters with sovereignty and the border . Border barriers as
sovereign swords: rethinking Walled States in light of the EU migrant and fiscal crises Wendy Brown Many scholars have sought to explain the
proliferation of nation-state walling over the past two decades, a proliferation that may seem paradoxical given that the most potent forms of
power and violence today are uncontainable by physical walling. My own contribution to this effort was a 2010 book arguing that the new
walls were often a political-theatrical response to eroding nation-state sovereignty (Brown, 2010). Barriers
like those at the US-Mexico, India-Pakistan or South Africa-Zimbabwe borders were generally ineffective in blocking
what they formally aimed to interdict. However, contemporary border walls function as symbolic and
semiotic responses to crises produced by eroded sovereign state capacities to secure territory, citizens
and economies against growing transnational flows of power, people, capital, religions, ideas or
terror. To say these walls are more theatrical than mechanical in their function is not to dismiss their importance: the theater matters a great
deal in an era in which states perdure as their sovereign powers wane, and powerful new nationalisms and reactionary citizen subjectivities are
one result. The argument of the book went further to suggest that walls
do not merely index but accelerate waning state
sovereignty: they blur the policing and military functions of states and also generate new vigilantism
at the border; they increase organized criminal operation s (and expand their transnational links) for smuggling
humans, drugs, weapons and other contraband across borders; and they intensify nationalist
sentiments that in turn spur demands for greater exercises of state sovereignty, more effective
walling and less flexibility in responding to globalization's vicissitudes and volatilities. In all of these ways,
the new border fortifications tend to deepen the crises of sovereignty to which they also respond. Far
from mere palliatives or props for degraded sovereign powers, they are a kind of pharmakon, worsening the problem they respond to even as
they throw a sop to constituencies anxious or angry at states' declining capacities to uphold social contracts to secure order, prosperity and
protection. I don't reject this argument completely today. Certainly
it is confirmed by United States President Donald
Trump's capacity to generate enthusiasm for walling the U.S.-Mexico border in excess of the multi-
billion dollar barricades and security system already in place. Trump stirs this enthusiasm
notwithstanding substantial evidence that variations in migrant flows from the South are largely
determined not by policing or barricades but by fluctuations in demand for cheap labor and also
notwithstanding evidence that new immigrant communities in the United States feature
comparatively lower crime rates and higher education and employment participation rates than are
found in other urban poor communities. My argument is confirmed as well by surging immigrant smuggling industries, anti-
immigrant vigilantism, and anti-immigrant nationalism in “Fortress Europe” in recent years. It is indirectly confirmed, too, by the June 2016
Brexit vote animated by anxiety about loss of British sovereignty and the desire to resurrect state power and jurisdiction, to regain national
control over policy, population, spending and borders. Such control may be a fantasy and the costs of pursuing that fantasy may be
extraordinary but such is the political life of waning nation state sovereignty.

The simulation system contains a semblance of security from anticipated risk from the
“radical other.” Virtual biopolitical border security practices operate through the
simulation of space to produce certain lives as bare life.
Vaughan-Williams, Professor of International Security and Head of the Department of
Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick, 2010 (Nick, “The UK border
security continuum: virtual biopolitics and the simulation of the sovereign ban,” Environment and
Planning D: Society and Space, 4/26/10, pg.s 8-12, https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/people/vaughan-
williams/publications/nvw_uk_border_security_continuum_epd_10.pdf, Accessed 7/9/18, GDI-JV)

In The History of Sexuality: Volume 1 Michel Foucault (1978) refers to the process by which biological
life (zoeš) has become
included within the modalities of state power (bios) as the transition from politics to `biopolitics'. As is well
known, biopolitics is the term used by Foucault to describe the emergence during the 17th century of attempts to govern populations through
the institutionalisation of medicine, the use of vaccinations, and other methods of curing and preventing disease. Foucault's argument is that,
whereas for Aristotle life and politics are treated as separate, biopolitics calls into question the idea of life itself: ``modern man is an animal
whose politics calls his existence as a living being into question'' (Foucault, 1978, page 188). For Foucault, the entry of zoeš into bios constitutes
a fundamental shift in the relation between politics and life, where the simple fact of life is no longer excluded from political calculations and
mechanisms but resides at the heart of modern politics. With the emergence of biopolitical technology to optimise human life as a state of life,
Foucault argues that sovereignty is constituted no longer by the ability to decide over life and death but by the ability to ``make live and let die''
(Foucault, 2003, page 241). According to this reconfiguration, sovereign power not so much disciplines as regularises life: a ``technology which
aims to achieve a sort of homeostasis, not by training individuals, but by achieving an overall equilibrium that protects the security of the whole
from internal dangers'' (Foucault, 2003, page 249). Furthermore, whereas disciplinary practices structure space by isolating, concentrating, and
enclosing bodies in order to enable some form of control over them, biopolitical apparatuses of security work precisely by allowing circulation,
flow, and movement, in order to govern mobile populations in an increasingly expansive space. In this way, Foucault writes: ``we see the
emergence of a completely different problem that is no longer that of fixing and demarcating the territory but that of allowing circulations to
take place, of controlling them, sifting the good and the bad, ensuring that things are always in movement, constantly moving around,
continually going from one point to another, but in such a way that the inherent dangers of this circulation are cancelled out'' (2003, page 65).
The move Foucault identifies from disciplinary to biopolitical practices is in many respects reflected in the step-change in the vision for the UK
border. The `old border philosophy'öpredicated on a single physical frontier located at a fixed site designed to hinder movementöstructured
space by enclosing bodies within a given territory. By contrast, as we have already seen, the new UK border doctrine resembles more of a
biopolitical apparatus of security in its mobility and enhancement of liberal subjects' movement. Yet, although Foucault's diagnosis of the
spatiality of biopolitics resonates with the UK border security continuum, it arguably fails to grasp the way in which these are essentially
sovereign practices that put lives in habitual jeopardy. A focus on the productive relation between politics and life excludes an appreciation of
how the bordersecurity continuum leads to forceful incarceration, torture, and even execution . It is for this
reason that Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben
seeks a different form of biopolitical analysis to that of Foucault: one
that brings sovereign relations and thanatopolitics, or the politics of death, back into the analysis
(Coleman and Grove, 2009). Whereas Foucault reads the movement from politics to biopolitics as a historical transformation involving the
inclusion of zoeš in the polis, for Giorgio Agamben the
political realm is originally biopolitical. On Agamben's view, the
West's conception of politics has always been biopolitical, but the nature of the relation between
politics and life has become even more visible in the context of the modern state and its sovereign
practices (Agamben, 1998, page 6). For Agamben, and contra Foucault, the activity of the biopolitical machine is
inherently linked with sovereignty, specifically a sovereign decision about whether certain forms of
life are worthy of living. Such a decision produces an expendable form of life banned from
conventional juridical ^ political structures that Agamben refers to throughout his work as `bare life'.
This form of life is the subject of practices of securitisation whose exceptionality defines the normality
of the politically qualified life of the citizen--a life that is secured by sovereign power in order to
secure itself. Under conditions whereby security has become the normal technique of government,
however, Agamben has (in)famously argued that ``we are all virtually homines sacri'' (1998, page 111). A
fuller exegesis of Foucault and Agamben, and a commentary on the nature of the relation between the two, is beyond the scope of this paper.
(7) Furthermore, I recognise that there are potentially many major problems with Agamben's work, particularly in respect of his treatment of
subjectivity (Butler, 2004) and the sovereign exception (Connolly, 2004; Prozorov, 2005). Despite these problems, however, there is an
interesting spatial dimension to Agamben's thought that is otherwise relatively overlooked in the literature. Notable exceptions in this context
are, of course, Claudio Minca (2005; 2006; 2007), who has examined the spatial ontology of Agamben's use of concepts such as the ban and the
camp, and Eyal Weizman (2007) who has analysed the global archipelago of spaces of exception in which bare life is (re)produced. Elsewhere, I
have sought to contribute to this literature by considering how Agamben's oeuvre prompts a reconsideration of the spatial limits of sovereign
power in terms of a ``generalised biopolitical border'' (Vaughan-Williams, 2008; 2009a; 2009b). What I want to consider in greater depth here,
however, are the spatial dimensions of Agamben's claim that ``we are all virtually homines sacri'' (1998, page 111). To do so, it is first necessary
to comment on the concept of the `virtual' in Agamben's controversial formulation, which, despite being prominent in one of his central theses,
remains remarkably uncommented upon. According to Jean Baudrillard, the verb `to simulate' means ``to feign to
have what one doesn't have'' (1994, page 3). For Baudrillard, however, simulation is not the same as
merely `pretending'. He illustrates this point by quoting Littre¨: ``whoever fakes an illness can simply stay in bed and make everyone
believe he is ill. Whoever simulates an illness produces in himself some of the symptoms'' (page 3). The
order of `pretending'
leaves some notion of `reality' intact, whereas, Baudrillard claims, ``simulation threatens the
difference between the `true' and the `false', the `real' and the `imaginary''' (page 3). Baudrillard argues
that, if once we knew something of the `true' or the `real', today all we have are simulacra, or `reality-
effects', and simulacra of simulacra (page 1). It is not then that reality is somehow being `masked' by
practices of simulation but that `the real' can only be understood as a form of `hyperreality' without
an origin or ground (page 1). Consequently, the `real' cannot be taken as a pure, stable, foundation; it is
always already `hyper-real', or what Baudrillard refers to as belonging to the realm of the `virtual' In
Simulation and Simulacrum (1994) Baudrillard expands his diagnosis of the virtual conditions of
contemporary political life with reference to the growing omnipotence of security. He argues that a
``hyper-model of security'' has emerged: ``a universal lock-up and control system whose deterrent
effect is not at all aimed at an atomic clash ... but, rather, at the much greater probability of any real
event, of anything that would be an event in the general system and upset its balance'' (page 33). Central
to the pursuit of `maximum security' is the notion of deterrence and the idea that ``nothing can be left
to contingencies'' (page 34). Indeed, such is the extent of deterrence, according to Baudrillard, that
security has now come to ``encompass the entire social field'' and ``virtually ... all social relations''
(pages 61 ^ 62). While Baudrillard's insights were written against the specific backdrop of the collapse of de¨tente and the beginning of a new
phase in Cold War history, I want to suggest that they resonate with current global security relations and are potentially helpful, especially
when read alongside Agamben's account of biopolitics, for an analysis of the dynamics expressed in the vision of the UK border security
continuum. In his reading of Baudrillard, Franc° ois Debrix refers to the way in which the
intensity of simulation is intrinsically
bound up with contemporary security practices: ``The totality of simulation systems in transpolitical
configurations is such that a virtual auto-immunization of Western societies from all sorts of
anticipated risks and dangers provides a complete semblance of security'' (page 51). According to Debrix, this
`simulated overprotection' relates to the West's desire to expunge ``death, evil, or the radically other''
from its global political systems in order to make ``all reality look, feel, and be good'' (Debrix, 2009, pages 51
^ 52). Thus, for example, contemporary Western security policies work within an ever-expansive
understanding of what and where the `homeland' is: a paradigm of virtual security `obsessive' about
``producing positive effects'' (`democracy',`freedom',`human rights') (pages 51 ^ 52). On this view, despite the fact that the above
logic continually breaks down, what is more significant about the paradigm of the virtual is the equally constant
attempts at simulating the effects of total security. For Michael Dillon `security' can be understood as ``a
kind of life science'' (2003, page 533). This is because biopolitical security apparatuses first require
knowledge of `life' if they are to succeed in securing it. Within the context of a desire to simulate the
effects of total security, there is no room for any form of life to escape such knowledge: ``Life that
remains not knowable, unknown or intractable to knowing for whatever reasonöit might be a form of
life that simply does not show up on the radars of knowing in acceptable ways, or, as an excess of
being over apprehension, it may simply not be knowable in principleöis the ultimate danger'' (page 533).
It is precisely for this reason, Dillon argues, that security must produce bare life as a form of life that is amenable
to its sway. Agamben's disturbing prognosis that ``we are all virtually homines sacri'' thus offers a clue
about the problematisation of life intrinsic to the paradigm of virtual security: one that, as Dillon puts
it, `knows' living things ``as contoured by a virtual potential, specifically the potential to become
dangerous'' (page 537). Central to this notion of security is the production of knowledge about the
becoming-dangerous of some risky subjects through algorithmic models of risk management based on
the profiling of populations: ``Security becomes a boundless science of the very engendering of
mutating form and of the tracking of the virtual potential for what are now essentially conceived as
bodies-in-formation in the process of becoming dangerous'' (page 538). Moreover, in the context of the
simulation of total security, where everything is potentially dangerous and nothing is safe, there is no
telos to this project: ``security has gone virtual through the ways in which the virtual is being widely
scripted in terms of an infinity of dangerous being'' (page 541). On this basis, practices of identity
management and preemption associated with the UK border security continuum can be read precisely
as new virtual cartographies of total knowledge and vision, which seek to identify and root out
uncertainties about who or what might pose a threat. Returning to Agamben, one might say that virtual
biopolitical border security practices pursue the objective of maximum security through the
simulation of the space ^ time of the ban.(8) Following this line of interpretation, Agamben's diagnosis is highly suggestive of a new
kind of nomos of the earth a© la Carl Schmitt's classical formulation: one that reveals a far more complex and less spatially/temporally fixed
relation between juridical ^ political order and spatial orientation.(9) As hinted at in Agamben's italicised use of the word `virtual', this reworked
nomos is simulated throughout everyday life in such a way that potentially emplaces us all under conditions of considerable uncertainty. On
this reading, the sovereign decision to produce some life as bare life is not one that necessarily happens
literally at specific points in space and time (though there may be instances where this logic might be revealed by, or perhaps
used for particular political purposes to interpret, a given event). Rather, in the order of the virtual as described by Baudrillard, this
decision can be reread as a far more generalised and reiterative process in the attempt to simulate total security. If
what emerges from Agamben's diagnosis appears to be a `totalizing vision of sovereign space' it is
precisely because this is the vision that animates the project of virtual security (Coleman and Grove, 2009).
Adopting a Baudrillardian reading, it is misguided to pursue questions about whether this or that event or situation `is' or `is not' a more or less
`true' or `accurate' instantiation of Agamben's Homo Sacer thesis . The simulation of the ban integral to the security and (re)production of
sovereign power means that, for example, debates about whether we can empirically say person x or y has `become bare life' are ultimately
somewhat missing the point. Such a line of enquiry assumes that the line between the politically qualified life of the citizen on the one hand
and the bare life of Homo Sacer on the other is far more stable than Agamben implies. More importantly, the viewpoint from which this sort of
enquiry would be possible reflects a mode of thinking that is outside the logic of virtuality and therefore blinkered to the ways in which the
sovereign ban operates via a logic of simulation.

The border security continuum is decentered and diffused across global terrain that
recruits ordinary citizens for “borderwork” that reifies the territorialist epistemology
and ontological trap of “territory” in the modern geopolitical imagination
Vaughan-Williams, Professor of International Security and Head of the Department of
Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick, 2010 (Nick, “The UK border
security continuum: virtual biopolitics and the simulation of the sovereign ban,” Environment and
Planning D: Society and Space, 4/26/10, pg.s 7-8, https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/people/vaughan-
williams/publications/nvw_uk_border_security_continuum_epd_10.pdf, Accessed 7/9/18, GDI-JV)

The vision of border security outlined in the UK's new doctrine is one that elongates, temporally and
spatially, what we commonly understand to be the border . This elongation is referred to by Adam Isles, CEO of
Raytheon, in terms of a border security continuum from departure overseas, to arrival on UK territory, to in-country stay management, to
departure, and finally to postdeparture.(6) As we have already seen, the
stretching of the UK border has a distinct
temporal dimension in the sense that attempts are being made to extend the reach of control into the
future via preemptive security practices; spatially, the border is increasingly projected globally beyond
the territorial limits of the UK via offshore practices. Yet, in another sense, the border is also being projected
internally throughout UK territory in ways that connect with practices at traditional flashpoints and overseas locations to form a security
continuum. Some of the technologies of control composing the inner-ring of UK defence, such as hotel registers, social security data, and the
use of identity documents for non-EU citizens, are prominent and familiar in the UK and elsewhere (Walters, 2002). Others, for example the
nationwide network of detention centres for those seeking asylum, are again not a new phenomenon but are largely hidden from the public
gaze (Darling, 2009). In addition to these practices, however, are a range of newly
developed extensions of the border
reflecting what Isles refers to as forms of ``in-country stay management ''. Thus, Raytheon conducts border
surveillance for the UK government by monitoring suspicious individuals via analysis of online activity using social
networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Another example of stay management includes controversial new immigration rules that
effectively turn universities into border sites as staff are called to be on the look-out for patterns of suspicious activity among international
students. Thinking the UK border in terms of a security continuum challenges a number of assumptions
about what and where borders are according to the modern geopolitical imagination. Instead of
viewing the border as a fixed control on movement located at the outer edge of the state the border
security continuum is decentred and diffused across a global terrain . Bordering practices, such as those
offshore preemptive modes of identity management characterising the UK's new border doctrine, no longer correspond only to
thin `lines in the sand' as depicted on Mercator's map. Rather, there is a spatial and temporal thickness to
borders, which belies the `line' metaphor and calls for new ways of thinking about the striation of
space. Moreover, though it is popular to think about the border as an `exceptional' site in global
politics (Doty, 2007), the UK border security continuum also works in part by precisely permeating
everyday life. Thus, `good' citizens are enjoined to be on the look-out for `suspicious individuals' not only
in public spaces such as the airport, railway station, or shopping centre but also among their neighbours at home (Vaughan-Williams, 2008). As
a consequence of this banalisation of the border, while UKBA personnel formally police strategic flashpoints, ordinary citizens are
increasingly involved as agents of various types of `borderwork' (Rumford, 2008). Further still, as we have seen, the
particular conception of `the border' at work in the UK is not one that is simply about preventing flows of
movement. The vision of the UK border security continuum bears more resemblance to a virtual
firewall than a wall in the traditional sense (Walters, 2006). That is to say, the primary objective of the new
UK border doctrine is not simply to stop movement as would a physical impermeable barrier . On the
contrary, as the Project Iris initiative indicates, the aim is to facilitate faster, more efficient, and comfortable customer experiences for trusted
liberal subjects whose movement the economy depends on. (6) All references to Raytheon are based on a presentation given by Adam Isles and
Martyn Dawkes at the 2009 GovNet Homeland and Border Security conference. These challenges pose conceptual and methodological
problems for the interdisciplinary study of borders in global politics. Indeed, the
main puzzle, as I see it, is how to develop
border thinking apposite to the analysis of developments in contemporary border-security practices
without reverting the territorialist epistemology and ontological trap of the modern geopolitical
imagination (Agnew, 1994; Lapid, 2001; Parker and Vaughan-Williams, 2009). What follows, therefore, is an exploration of two alternative
registersöthe biopolitical and the virtualöthat I argue offer innovative critical resources for examining what is at stake in the new UK border
doctrine and broader dynamics of global security relations.

Border control securitizes data on migrants in order to reduce the human stories of
people to units of risk management.
Lalonde, Professor in the Department of Sociology and Legal Studies 2017 [Patrick,
“Cyborg Work: Borders as Simulation,” The British Journal of Criminology azx070,
https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azx070] GDI-CL

Borders proceed exactly in the way Bogard (1996) demonstrates that surveillance is simulated.
According to the principles outlined above (1) the work of bordering and related border technologies
unfold at an increasing variety of sites and (2) traditional physical borders persist and continue to
perform various functions. States increasingly perform mobility and border governance at a distance,
employing visa offices overseas, international policing agencies, third-party commercial carriers,
airlines, academic institutions, social welfare agencies and a variety of other actors in both policing
mobility and assisting in information collection on individuals, corporations, and commodities. Such
diffusion, as Ericson (2007: 4) contends, develops in an attempt to reconcile the fact that ‘security’ is
very much an imaginary given it requires knowledge of a future that is ultimately unknowable. Such
reliance on telematic policing means states must solve the problem of governing mobilities and flows in
advance of and also at physical borders. To this end, as Bogard (1996: 9) illustrates, surveillance (and
indeed policing functions) related to borders can be simulated to eliminate the gap between virtual
and physical control and cut the time of the transmission of data to zero. Such simulation is perfected
by the third principle of modern borders, namely, borders and mobility are governed by and through
the calculation and analysis of risk. As Ericson (2007: 6) argues, one way societies attempt to control
the future is through ‘scientific’ measures of risk. Data collection proliferates in an attempt to harness
risk-management practices in governing the future. Risk unfolds as a neoliberal technology of
governance, with individuals and other entities responsibilized in self-governing personal behaviour to
ensure their own security and prosperity (Ericson 2007: 6). In terms of borders (and following the
fourth principle outlined above), states responsibilize a variety of third parties (visa offices, passport
agencies, international policing agencies, third-party commercial carriers, airlines, private citizens and
so forth) in providing data collection functions in advance of physical borders. Accordingly,
technologies of governance such as carrier sanctions redesign such spaces as ‘semi-formal spaces of
migration control…’ (Walters 2006b: 194). These third parties ultimately become part of border
security assemblages—in the style of Haggerty and Ericson’s (2000) surveillant assemblage—and, by
extension, security continua that rely (in part) on borders (the fifth principle outlined above). Such
data collection contributes to the formation of data doubles (or dividuals) in databases. These images
(or signs) as part of simulation serve not as copies of ‘the real’, but rather as replacements for ‘the
real’ (Bogard 1996: 20). Whenever someone enters the border security assemblage (when attempting
to obtain a visa, when checking in at the airport, when arriving at a physical border, and so forth), his or
her body and personal narrative no longer serve as an identity for analysis. Rather, much like the Xerox
machine, the original exists only insofar as it brings forth its replacement (the dividual) onto the
‘stretched screens’ (Lyon 2009) of border agents. Personal narrative is rendered irrelevant as agents
already have what is perceived to be a ‘history in advance’ (Bogard 1996: 23), which is used to govern
mobility via risk.Long before individuals reach physical borders, they have already become part of the
border security assemblage, the simulation of security, and have been coded as dividuals. They have
(in many ways) been pre-selected prior to arrival. Consider travellers intending to travel to another
country via an airport. Even before they are permitted to board an airplane, individuals are already
rendered as dividuals. This process begins when individuals attempt to obtain travel documents (i.e.
passports), serving the function of creating dividuals in databases and also cross-referencing new
dividuals with established dividuals contained in existing databases. In many cases, individuals must
also secure a visa prior to departure in order to travel to their destination country. This part of the
border assemblage allows agents to further cross-reference (now established) dividuals with various
databases to assess risk, allows for the collection of biometrics for positive identification on the front
end (at the visa office) and eventually on the back end (at the physical border), and tracks the
movement (including failed attempts) of dividuals. Lastly, responsibilized private agents working for
airlines at international airports collect data that serves to further establish identity at check-in and
adds this information to databases for border officials to examine prior to and during arrival, and also
further cross-references the dividual with prior established international and nation-specific
databases such as no-fly lists.The aforementioned methods serve to dividualize and ultimately limit
(and exclude) mobility in a variety of ways. Passport and visa controls enforced by petty sovereign
(Butler 2004) state actors serve to exclude (1) risky others, e.g., certain classes of criminals and those
suspected of terrorism who are banned from obtaining a passport from their country of origin or a
visa from their destination country, (2) those without the ability to establish prior identity (i.e. those
without birth records and other required identity documents), (3) those (primarily) in the global south
too poor to afford a passport or visa processing and/or unable to access passport and visa offices and
(4) individuals from certain ‘banned’ countries unable to obtain a visa. Private agents working for
airlines (and other carriers) also function as private petty sovereigns (see Amoore and de Goede 2005,
de Goede 2007), working to provide security functions on behalf of the state to further exclude (1)
individuals too impoverished to afford tickets or without access to an international airport, (2)
individuals without a valid visa or identity document, (3) anyone carrying weapons and/or dangerous
goods at security checkpoints, (4) unlimited travel based on carrier routing and (5) those dividuals
deemed too risky to fly (i.e. on a no-fly list).In short, before reaching a physical border, travellers
transiting through airports—depending on their citizenship and visa requirements of the destination
country—may be subjected to no fewer than three identity verifications, one biometric data
collection, three identity cross-references with pre-established databases to assess risk, and greater
than ten ways to be excluded from travel before even boarding an airplane. International arrivals’
customs and immigration checkpoints at airports are therefore only receiving a very small and pre-
coded fraction of travellers out of all possible travellers in the world. According to Duffield (2010), it is
through such mechanisms that the policing of migration alongside global development governance
can be seen as complicit in producing a ‘planetary order’ confining large swaths of the global (south)
population in situ. In essence, the vast majority of airport arrivals are ‘ideal’ types of pre-coded and
known (dividualized) flows that pass all checks and balances and comply with risk-management
technologies. They hold the proper passwords necessary for mobility within the simulation (explored
below). While those arriving at land borders are theoretically subject to less prior scrutiny, the potential
‘flood’ of mobility is still controlled in a variety of ways via producing dividuals and within simulated
borders. This process is enhanced by policies such as the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative that
mandate the use of passports at borders, serving to construct dividuals regionally in advance of travel.
 Rights
Appeals to rights cannot stop violence at the border because the border is a space of
sovereign exception
Salter, Professor at the School of Political Studies, University of Ottawa, 2006 (Mark B., “The Global
Visa Regime and the Political Technologies of the International Self: Borders, Bodies, Biopolitics,”
Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 31, Google Scholar, Accessed 7/9/18 GDI-GN

Only the national border may be considered a state of exception, as opposed to other social or spatial
borders. Entry to a house is plainly governed by a set of legal restrictions on the power of the state , such
as the US Fourth Amendment right to be protected from unreasonable search. However, rights are configured
quite differently at the border.21 In the United States, the authority by which the Customs and Border Patrol
is empowered to search border-crossers is different from that of police [19 U.S.C. 1467], which derives from
an early congressional act of July 31, 1789 [1 St. 43]. It is the very space of the border that makes the burden of law different. The
threshold between law and force is spatialized or rather conditional on a particular mobility : “searches
made at the border, pursuant to the longstanding right of the sovereign to protect itself by stopping
and examining persons and property crossing into this country, are reasonable simply by virtue of the fact
that they occur at the border.”22 The right to detain, examine, and search travelers is defined in
relation to their foreignness, their origins “outside,” which renders them without protection while under
question at the border. Searches within state’s territory and at the border bear two different
standards: “probable cause” is replaced by “reasonable suspicion .” Thus, state actions at the border are
a special case of law. “Border searches, then, from before the adoption of the Fourth Amendment, have been considered to be
‘reasonable’ by the single fact that the person or item in question had entered into our country from the outside.”23 That which is
outside both constitutes and threatens the integrity of the inside, and the decision to include/ exclude
both defines the population of the state and gives lie to the presumed homogeneity and stability of
that community.24 This situation of permanent threat is neutralized through the successful management of risk at the border in a way
that renders threat permanent and insolvable. The visa regime, and the delocalization of the border that it
represents, is emblematic of this management. However, Agamben has neglected the management
inherent in the moment of sovereign decision. He provides no account of the specific decisions of
admission to the camp or by our extension to the state population at the border. The conditions of
possibility of this decision are at the heart of the border regime as a state of exception. In the same way that
the sovereign decision to declare a state of emergency can have no rules or conditions (because all emergencies are by definition exceptions to
normal conditions), so too the specific decision for entry into the polis has no set of exhaustive guidelines or
regulations. I refer to Josiah Heyman and Janet A. 172 The Global Visa Regime: Borders, Bodies, Biopolitics Gilboy below whose
anthropologies of immigration inspectors illustrate the way that all decisions to include/exclude rely on sovereign force rather than law.

Their conception of rights still relies on the ability to discern bare life—“rights” must
be attributed to a certain kind of life from which those deemed unworthy can be
excluded
Heins 5 [Volker, Visiting Professor of Political Science, Concordia University, Montreal, and Senior
Fellow at the Institute for Social Research, Frankfurt, Germany, German Law Journal, Vol. 6, No. 5, p.
845-8]

A more forceful and radical critique has been put forth by the Italian political philosopher Giorgio
Agamben.2 In noticable contrast to the sociology of globalization, which has assured us for years that
state sovereignty is gradually disappearing to the benefit of a "world of flows" comprising goods,
individuals, capital and information, Agamben argues in his book Homo sacer that we continue to live
under the auspices of a classical state as it was conceived in early modern Europe. Accordingly, the
primary charasteristic of the state is its capacity to define and occasionally erase the boundary
between "normality" and "emergency" and thus the capacity to transform society into a "camp" or
Lager populated by citizens reduced to "bare life." Moreover, the current western state is said to blur
the line between the normal and the exceptional, between peace and war, by increasingly taking an
interest in us not only as citizens, but also as embodied beings—an interest illustrated, for example, by
the growing tendency towards biometric registration of travelers at border crossings. Agamben, in all
seriousness, has placed this trend in an epochal relationship with the tatooing of concentration camp
inmates.3 His essay's far-reaching appeal rests on the fact that it combines in a single formula the moral
and legal achievements of western societies—in particular the ethos of human rights—with their slides
into totalitarianism. By suggesting that human rights are deeply intertwined with the forces of
inhumanity against which they are being invoked, Agamben plays to a primarily Continental European
public once again afflicted by self-doubts about the moral standing of liberal societies and their legal
systems. The vaguely dystopian perspective of his legal theory explains why Agamben is considered
"interesting" by many.4 Since Agamben's theses are already well-known and much-discussed, I will
confine myself to a nutshell summary of his main argument before I offer a concise critique of his ideas
on the place of humanitarian law and humanitarian action in today's legal and political world. Agamben
maintains that since the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679 the "bare life" of the individual has been subjected
to a twofold move: it was given a protected, even "sacred" status beyond the immediate grasp of
political power, but it was also isolated and separated from the wider range of human forms of
expression. The bare life of physical individuals, stripped of moral agency and social intercourse,
became the object of a particular juridical mode of attention. Agamben mistrusts the human right to
physical integrity in a way that is reminiscent of Michel Foucault, who felt that the discursive isolation
of "sexuality" along with its construction as a singular object of attention was far more significant
than the fluctuating history of its "liberation" or "repression."5 There is, of course, some prima facie
plausibility that the trafficking of human beings, medical end-of-life issues or the detention of "illegal
combatants" have indeed turned the bare life of individuals into an object of widespread concern and
debate.6 The concern for the life of others is also nurtured by the reporting mechanisms of U.N. human
rights bodies as well as the continuous attention of specialized NGOs and the media. In all these cases,
Agamben’s principal cause for vexation lies in the persistent separation of this core aspect of the human
from wider political and communitarian questions. Drawing on the distinction between human rights
and civil rights made by Hannah Arendt, he writes: The separation between humanitarianism and
politics that we are experiencing today is the extreme phase of the separation of the rights of man
from the rights of the citizen. In the final analysis, however, humanitarian organizations—which to-day
are more and more supported by international commissions—can only grasp human life in the figure of
bare and sacred life, and therefore, despite themselves, maintain a secret solidarity with the very
powers they ought to fight [...]. A humanitarianism separated from politics cannot fail to reproduce
the isolation of sacred life at the basis of sovereignty, and the camp—which is to say, the pure space
of exception—is the biopolitical paradigm that it cannot master.7 This paragraph contains four
propositions that are questionable on both empirical and normative grounds. In what follows, I will
either reject these propositions outright or extract the kernel of truth contained within them before
making a suggestion about how we might theoretically classify Agamben’s position. The four
propositions are: 1) The distinction between the humanitarian and the political is an expression of the
opposition between human rights and civil rights. 2) The goal of humanitarian organizations is the
identification and preservation of "bare life." 3) Because of their reliance on the
political/humanitarian divide, such organizations become unwitting accomplices of those who are
responsible for the very social suffering that they aim to minimize. 4) The separation between
humanitarianism and politics can and should be overcome in favor of something completely new.

“Rights” are inextricably bound up in the sovereign decision about who to include and
exclude regarding what counts as “human,” a “citizen”
Agamben 98 [Giorgio, professor of philosophy at university of Verona, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power
and Bare Life, pg. 126-128]

Hannah Arendt entitled the fifth chapter of her book on imperialism, which is dedicated to the problem
of refugees, “The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man.” Linking together the
fates of the rights of man and of the nation-state, her striking formulation seems to imply the idea of an
intimate and necessary connection between the two, though the author herself leaves the question
open. The paradox from which Arendt departs is that the very figure who should have embodied the
rights of man par excellence—the refugee—signals instead the concept’s radical crisis. “The
conception of human rights,” she states, “based upon the assumed existence of a human being as
such, broke down at the very moment when those who professed to believe in it were for the first
time confronted with people who had indeed lost all other qualities and specific relationships—except
that they were still human” (Orz~ins, p. 299). In the system of the nation-state, the so-called sacred
and inalienable rights of man show themselves to lack every protection and reality at the moment in
which they can no longer take the form of rights belonging to citizens of a state. If one considers the
matter, this is in fact implicit in the ambiguity of the very title of the French Declaration of the Rights of
Man and Citizen, of 1789. In the phrase La dicia ration des dro its tie I’homme et du citoyen, it is not
clear whether the two terms homme and citoyen name two autonomous beings or instead form a
unitary system in which the first is always already included in the second. And if the latter is the case,
the kind of relation that exists between homme and citoyen still remains unclear. From this perspective,
Burke’s boutade according to which he preferred his “Rights of an Englishman” to the inalienable rights
of man acquires an unsuspected profundity. Arendt does no more than offer a few, essential hints
concerning the link between the rights of man and the nation-state, and her suggestion has therefore
not been followed up. In the period after the Second World War, both the instrumental emphasis on
the rights of man and the rapid growth of declarations and agreements on the part of international
organizations have ultimately made any authentic understanding of the historical significance of the
phenomenon almost impossible. Yet it is time to stop regarding declarations of rights as proclamations
of eternal, metajuridical values binding the legislator (in fact, without much success) to respect eternal
ethical principles, and to begin to consider them according to their real historical function in the modern
nation-state. Declarations of rights represent the originary figure of the inscription of natural life in
the juridico-political order of the nation-state. The same bare life that in the ancien regime was
politically neutral and belonged to God as creaturely life and in the classical world was (at least
apparently) clearly distinguished as zoe from political life (bios) now fully enters into the structure of
the state and even becomes the earthly foundation of the state’s legit imacy and sovereignty. A simple
examination of the text of the Declaration of 1789 shows that it is precisely bare natural life—which is
to say, the pure fact of birth—that appears here as the source and bearer of rights. “Men,” the first
article declares, “are born and remain free and equal in rights” (from this perspective, the strictest
formulation of all is to be found in La Fayette’s project elaborated in July 1789: “Every man is born with
inalienable and indefeasible rights”). At the same time, however, the very natural life that, inaugurating
the biopolitics of modernity, is placed at the foundation of the order vanishes into the figure of the
citizen, in whom rights are “preserved” (according to the second article: “The goal of every political
association is the preservation of the natural and indefeasible rights of man”). And the Declaration can
attribute sovereignty to the “nation” (according to the third article: “The principle of all sovereignty
resides essentially in the nation”) precisely because it has already inscribed this element of birth in
the very heart of the political community. The nation—the term derives etymologically from nascere
(to be born)—thus closes the open circle of man’s birth.
Disciplinary Power
 Surveillance
Practices of surveillance at the border discipline subjects even when they don’t result
in overt material violence because they construct populations as docile bodies
Wood, Lecturer at the University of Newcastle, 2007 (David, Chapter 23, Space, Knowledge
and Power: Foucault and Geography, eds. Stuart Elden, Professor of Political Theory and Geography and
Jeremy Crampton, Ph.D The Pennsylvania State University, 2007, pg.s 245-249, EBSCO, Accessed
7/10/18 GDI-JV)

Surveillance Studies is a transdisciplinary field that draws from sociology, psychology, organization
studies, science and technology studies, information science, criminology, law, political science and
geography. It emerged through combination of the mainstream liberal sociological approach of Rule (1973) via Giddens (1985) which,
following Zuboff (1998) and Gary Marx (1988), was combined with Foucault, in particular Discipline and Punish (1977), and its reading of
Bentham’s Panopticon. There are of course other theoretical approaches: Marxism; Weber; Machiavelli; anarchism and situationalism, all offer
useful avenues. But a relatively smooth story can be told of the movement from Foucault’s panopticism to a ‘surveillance society’ (Lyon 1993;
1994), via a ‘new surveillance’ (Marx 1988; 2003) of computerized and increasingly automated ‘social sorting’
(Gandy 1993; Lyon 2001; Lyon 2002a) based on ‘categorical suspicion’ (Marx 1988; Norris and Armstrong 1999). This is a
simplification, but how much this story can be sustained by the foundations provided by Discipline and Punish, and the different places assigned
to the Panopticon, panopticism, this book and Foucault, are the matters to be discussed here. This chapter considers the central arguments in
Discipline and Punish, outlines some common surveillance-related critiques before discussing developments beyond criticism and
interpretation. It concludes by suggesting ways forward largely through a combination of Deleuze and Actor-Network Theory Foucault is clear
about his aims: the final sentence of the book summarizes that it
‘must serve as a historical background to various
studies of the power of normalization and the formation of knowledge in modern society’ (308). This is
a history of knowledge not material things, even though spatio-temporally specific materialities may
be inscribed with or represent this knowledge. In the first pages, following the horrific description of the public torture and
death of Damiens, and Faucher’s rules for young prisoners, Foucault sets out to: … regard punishment as a complex
social function … regard punishment as a political tactic … make the technology of power the very
principle both of the humanization of the penal system and of the knowledge of man … [and] study
the metamorphosis of punitive methods on the basis of a political technology of the body in which
might be read a common history of power relations and object relations . (23–4) This is a deliberate attempt to
understand these developments free of moral judgements – because as a writer, Foucault too sees all of us, himself included, caught in the
same webs of power, that constitute those things we regard as objective truth or the ‘facts as they are’ :
there is no free classical
subject. In opposition to those who conflate Foucault and Orwell or Arendt, and both the positive and negative view of liberals and the
Frankfurt school respectively, the modern subject is seen as an intrinsic part of what we call progress – it is the result of the process of
civilization that began with the enlightenment. His project then is to expose that supposedly objective fact to scrutiny and make it reveal its
composition and history – its genealogy. Why do so many apparently find this problematic? Bruno Latour (2005) remarks that the Francophone
and Anglophone academic worlds are divided not just by language but by underlying assumptions about communication: French writers assume
a semiotic education that understands the text as having an existence in itself, and a relationship with everything outside. One has to conduct a
double reading of the book as text and as interactive: Mottier (2001) thus describes them as ‘bookbombs’ or toolkits for thought and action.
What then does the book actually argue? It tells of sovereign
monarchical power (arche) with its capricious and
limited but directed, spectacular and often lethal impact on bodies, transformed by knowledge of
both the individual human and humans together. These rational, scientific, and humanist reforms changed conceptions of
justice and the place of the body in this schema. Part One thus deals with torture and the spectacle of public execution as ‘power that not only
did not hesitate to exert itself directly on bodies, but was exalted and strengthened by its visible manifestations’ (Foucault 1977, 57). Part Two
covers the development of enlightened understanding of criminality and the humanization of the penality in the eighteenth century. This
begins with attempts to formulate punishments that match or mirror directly the crime of the offender through signing on the body. As a
development from the symbolic act of public execution, this remained ‘a lesson for all’, however these ‘fair’ systems of punishment were
rapidly replaced by ‘the law of detention for every offence of any importance, except those requiring the death penalty’ (116). Part Three
introduces new elements, in particular: the concepts of the soldier and general militarization; and the emerging mechanical science of the body,
exemplified in La Mettrie’s L’Homme-machine (136). Both these knowledges were productive of the notion of the body
as ‘docile’, trainable through repetitive disciplinary practices. This is the origin of the modern subject:
the malleable, improvable person. Foucault’s argument is that ‘in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the
disciplines became general formulas of domination’ (137). Crucial here is not just the body itself, but the
spatial and temporal distribution and regulation of the body: time was divided into smaller units to
allow for total control of activity, likewise space was constructed so as to enclose but also to partition.
Bringing these concepts together is the idea of productive ordering: the classification and
arrangement of all kinds of properties and entities into ‘tableaux vivants’, to maximize their
usefulness (148). Things had to be intelligible to be manageable, and manageable to be productive. This
management of the space-time of all entities changed our conception of time itself, and produced the
idea of ‘progress’; the ‘geneses’ of individuals was paralleled by the ‘evolution’ of society, a
development that maintains its hold. This training of malleable subjects in a progressive social order is
accomplished through two main ‘instruments’. The first is hierarchical observation exemplified by the
military camp, a ‘diagram of a power that acts by means of general visibility’ (171). The second is
normalizing judgement found within institutions such as schools and factories. The visibility effected
through hierarchical observation is not enough; a ‘micro-penality of time ’ (178) has to be
operationalized, acting in gaps in law, enforced and corrective through both punishment and reward.
This makes explicit the boundary between normal and abnormal – it is not repression but the
generation of a shared sameness – but also, through examination, categorizes people according to
worth within that normal community. Already, it can be seen that the Panopticon is not the only point of the book. It is not even
the only exemplar of panopticism. This has been pointed out most recently by Norris (2003) and Elden (2003), both of whom emphasize the
importance of plague. For the control of the town of Vincennes faced with epidemic is where Foucault begins elaborating panopticism. The
town becomes a camp, a blockaded space where normal rules are suspended to fight an outside evil:
This enclosed, segmented space, observed at every point, in which the individuals are inserted in a
fixed place, in which the slightest movements are supervised, in which all events are recorded, in
which an uninterrupted work of writing links the centre and the periphery, in which power is
exercised without division, according to a continuous hierarchical figure, in which each individual is
constantly located, examined and distributed among the living beings, the sick and the dead – all this
constitutes a compact model of the disciplinary mechanism. (197) Plague represents those things the
ordering gaze seeks to overcome: abnormality, disorder, chaos, license, whose previously dominant
conception was that of the leper: excluded and rejected. Instead the disordered are to be ordered.
Foucault is clear that, ‘Bentham’s Panopticon is the architectural figure of this composition’ (200): simply
one aspect. Elden (2003) argues that it is ‘the culmination of technologies of power rather than their beginning’
(245–6), however, like the camp or plague town, the Panopticon represents both the summation of power/ knowledge in the text thus far, and
another transformation. By making the inmates totally visible to an assumed gaze, the Panopticon acts ‘to
induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic
functioning of power’. It is ‘light’ power as opposed to the ‘heavy’ power of the monarch’s dungeon, because the prisoner, by
watching himself, ‘becomes the principle of his own subjection’ (203). The transformation occurs because unlike both
camp and plague-town, the Panopticon is a permanent structure. It is normal not exceptional. It is therefore conceptually generalizable: a
disciplinary dispositif rather than a disciplinary blockade. It is not that the Panopticon actually is built everywhere – it is a utopia – but that it is
the purest expression of the trajectory from exclusion and blockade towards generalized discipline. The principles of this discipline are: the
transformation of the disciplines emerging from monasticism and the army, etc. from negative to positive and productive, that is ‘to become
attached to some of the great essential functions: factory production, the transmission of knowledge, the diffusion of aptitudes and skills, the
war-machine’ (211); ‘the swarming of disciplinary mechanisms’ (211) or their tendency to diffuse outward from those institutions into society
as more flexible forms; and finally, state control of these mechanisms, most of which had previously been religious, through organizations like
the police. Here Foucault makes explicit connections to marxism and liberalism, arguing that disciplines are essentially ordering techniques that
have a ‘very close relationship’ with production and the division of labour, indeed ‘each makes the other possible and necessary; each provides
a model for the other’ (221). At the same time the normality constituted by disciplinary mechanisms was bourgeois, and this class’s advances in
democracy and legal equality have to be understood alongside panopticism, ‘the other, dark side of these processes’ (222). Foucault asks why
disciplinary advances are not celebrated as are other historical developments, such as record-keeping or mining or the Panopticon compared to
the steam engine and microscope. It has not only because it seems ‘inglorious’ and alien to our internalized heroic story of progress. This
remains important: as Roy Boyne remarks, ‘any
deep critique of surveillance as a principle would have to imply a
critique of social democracy and social welfare simultaneously, and may help explain the relative calm
with which the contemporary development of surveillance powers has been received’ (292). Ultimately, in
the early nineteenth century, this resulted in a distributed ‘carceral archipelago’, ‘a multiple network of diverse elements’ (307), exemplified by
the 1840 opening of Mettray children’s prison, ‘the disciplinary form at its most extreme, the model in which are concentrated all the coercive
technologies of behaviour’ (293). But this is another culmination/transformation, with the simultaneous emergence of psychology, psychiatry
and scientific medicine, which sought to reach inside the body. It is not the Panopticon, but the
combination of institutions and
an era when ‘medicine, psychology, education, public assistance, “social work” assume an ever
greater share of the powers of supervision and assessment’ (306) that produces ‘an art of punishing
more or less our own’ (296). In the ‘carceral’, it is not that everywhere becomes a prison, but that ‘prison and its role as link are losing
something of their purpose’ (306). The issue then is ‘the steep rise in the use of these mechanisms of normalization and the wide-ranging
powers which, through the proliferation of new disciplines, they bring with them’ (306).

Border surveillance reduces migrants to data to be managed—flesh and blood people

are reduced to clones of their data through the management of security apparatuses.
Lalonde, Professor in the Department of Sociology and Legal Studies 2017 [Patrick,
“Cyborg Work: Borders as Simulation,” The British Journal of Criminology azx070,
https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azx070] GDI-CL

It is through this conceptualization that contemporary borders are best explored—not as sites par
excellence for security performances, but rather as part of the simulation of security and surveillance
whereby there is no longer a distinction between ‘reality’ and ‘fantasy’. According to Bogard (1996: 9),
simulations allow the gap between virtual control and actual control to disappear. What Bogard refers
to as telematics societies (societies that perform governance processes ‘at a distance’) function by
employing simulation technologies toward cutting the time of the transmission of data to zero (Bogard
1996: 9). Accordingly: This, for Baudrillard, is our own era, where the circulation of sign-images
dominate, but rather than being ‘false’ images, now have the function of concealing the fact that
reality itself is absent behind its representation (Bogard 1996: 11).Bogard refers to this as panoptic
imagery whereby the architecture of control and orders of space and time characteristic of institutions
(see Foucault 1975) are replaced by ‘cyberarchitectures’ as well as coding designed to produce images
onscreen anywhere and anytime (Bogard 1996: 19). Reality becomes whatever is programmed within
the simulation, with images (or signs) in the simulation serving not as copies of ‘the real’, but rather as
replacements for ‘the real’ (Bogard 1996: 20). Derrida (1972) discusses the importance of signs in that
‘The sign represents the present in its absence… The sign, in this sense, is deferred presence’ (p.
9).Signs are ultimately coded and stored in databases as data doubles or dividuals (Deleuze 1992).
Indeed, as Dijstelbloem and Broeders (2015) indicate, the inclusion/exclusion dichotomy is no longer
useful in terms of describing border control technologies. Rather, in terms of migration, ‘the insider–
outsider distinction is being replaced by a much more heterogeneous handling of technologically
constructed non-publics’ (Dijstelbloem and Broeders 2015: 23). Accordingly:To the authorities at least,
[the signs] would become in some ways more real than our real selves, because they would stand in
for and verify the reality of those selves in ways that are, or have the potential to be, absolutely
certain. . . . Simulation, in fact, would in such cases carry surveillance, the unmasking of reality, to its
logical limit and conclusion – perfect information on individuals, perfect exposure, and perfect
discipline (Bogard 1996: 21).According to Bogard, dividuals are reproduced like a photocopy through a
Xerox (photocopier) machine in that ‘Any original only exists, for the Xerox, to copy, and thus, for all it
cares, as a copy’ (Bogard 1996: 45). The clone of the original serves as a perfect repetition of the
original such that it stands in irrefutably for the original. As this process occurs and dividuals become
the replicated identity of individuals, databases proliferate to handle incessant collection of data and
refine data doubles as necessary. These technologies serve to simulate surveillance in that they
generate a single profile (dividual) from infinitesimal data points derived from various sources (Bogard
1996: 27). Such virtual systems, according to Bogard (1996: 23), are indifferent to human history and
personal narrative. The image of the dividual becomes the undisputed ‘history in advance’ for
authorities to review (Bogard 1996: 23). According to Bogard (1996: 44) all this promises full front-end
control by infallibly guaranteeing certain flows in advance while abandoning the need for strategies of
monitoring and security performances. Simulated technologies of surveillance ultimately attempt to
produce ‘the transcendence of limits of time, space, life and death, and the body’ (Bogard 1996: 51).
As such they are transmutable—anyone can plug into such databases anywhere and immediately call
forth dividuals and manage flows with or without the presence of individuals.

The border collapses the distinction between the virtuality of data and the real of
lived experience—border surveillance and migrant admittance play out according to
predetermined scripts written by the act of data collection at totalizing scales
Lalonde, Professor of Department of Sociology and Legal Studies (2017), "Patrick, 25
November 2017 , Cyborg Work: Borders as Simulation," 7-8-18 The British Journal of Criminology
azx070, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azx070.”GDI-CL

Baudrillard (1981) makes the connection between simulation and societies of control abundantly clear
through his examination of an early reality TV programme focused on the Loud family. While portrayed
as an organic and ‘raw’ examination of the American family simply going about life as if cameras were
not present (something Baudrilliard sees as simple utopian fantasy), Baudrillard (1981: 51) indicates that
the family was already hyperreal in their very selection for filming. The family was not randomly selected
but rather represented a statistical aggregation of the ‘ideal American family’. Much like border
subjects, in many ways, the family was ‘known’ and pre-selected as ideal subjects. They represented
(through aggregated data) the characteristic ‘dividual’ of the American family. Baudrillard demonstrates
how the ‘truth’ regarding the life of the family was ultimately replaced by the ‘truth’ of the TV. In short,
the TV (much like the stretched screens of border agents) serves to render truth (Baudrillard 1981: 51–
52). This, to Baudrillard, represents the end of the panoptic gaze and its replacement by ‘the
manipulative truth of the test which probes and interrogates, of the laser that touches and then
pierces, of computer cards that retain your punched-out sequences…’ (p. 52). Much like the
governance of borders through risk, it is no longer the historical narrative of the individual that
matters, but rather the pre-coded and value-laden assumptions within simulations that test perceived
infallible data located in the dividual. This, according to Baudrillard (1981: 52), represents the end of
the panoptic system that relied on a despotic gaze within a defined social space, and its replacement
by a society of control that abandons attempts to render individuals transparent in favour of rending
them predictable. As simulations shift governing efforts towards dividuals, it is no longer necessary for
individuals to be always seen, heard and recorded. Rather, it becomes necessary to develop a ‘system
of mapping’ whereby the collection of data contributes to controlling mobility vis-à-vis dividuals. The
data characterizing dividuals come to replace the panoptic image of the individual as the focal point of
control. The individual does not need to be actively surveilled at physical borders to produce decisions
regarding mobility. Rather, infinitesimal data points can be collected (including by non-state, third-
party actors) indefinitely to ascertain the risk of the dividual and govern mobility with or without the
physical presence of the individual. The population is no longer governed via the violence and
surveillance of the state against individuals characteristic of disciplinary institutions. Rather,
biopolitical post-panoptic governance unfolds as a system of deterrence designed to control the
mobility of dividuals within simulations (Baudrillard 1981: 53–54). Submission of the individual is no
longer necessary, as individuals are instead deterred from participating in ‘risky’ behaviours that have
the potentiality of producing data points that could generate a risky dividual with a password
excluding mobility.As Côté-Boucher et al. (2014) argue, there is a need for the literature to consider
how border security is governed as an everyday practice by those appointed to carry out duties
related to it. The strength of theoretical perspectives (like the simulation of borders) can only be derived
by considering how they function in relation to the everyday practice of ‘bordering’. Recent analyses
have examined how border officers in Canada employ risk towards reaching determinations. This has
included employing risk through advanced commercial information (Côté-Boucher 2013: 155–158) as
well as surveillance technologies used to produce advanced identification of individuals (Côté-Boucher
2008). A content analysis of training documents and manuals obtained by the researcher through ATIP
requests filed with CBSA was performed to further test the simulation metaphor. According to the
‘Indicators’ CBSA Port of Entry Recruitment Training (POERT) programme module: One of the main
1

purposes of indicators is to distinguish high-risk travelers from low-risk travelers. Through the use of
questioning, document examination, lookouts, enforcement bulletins, intelligence bulletins, database
results, and contraband detection tools, [officers] will be able to identify multiple indicators which will
allow [them] to determine which travelers pose the highest risk (p. 1).When identity documents are
scanned by officers into CBSA Integrated Primary Inspection Line (IPIL) computer systems, databases
present officers with dividuals in return. Risk information is provided about dividuals that
automatically leads to further customs and/or immigration processing and searches (irrespective of
questions posed by the officer). Various alerts concerning the dividual—lookouts based on intelligence
information gathered, previous customs seizures, previous immigration matters, outstanding arrest
warrants or lost or stolen identity documents—produce a level of risk that mandates further
processing (CBSA 2015: 20–22). This is confirmed in the ‘Referrals’ POERT module, which states, ‘A
mandatory referral is a referral that a BSO must make for further documentation or examination by
Customs… or on behalf of other government departments’ (p. 23). The module then lists several types
of mandatory customs referrals, including (1) documentation/permit requirements, (2) payment of
duties and taxes, (3) inability of the officer to reach the point of finality with a traveller (including
issues surrounding identity) and (4) when a lookout exists on a vehicle license plate or traveller name
(p. 23). This module also lists categories for individuals requiring a mandatory referral for immigration
secondary, including (but not limited to) people included in inadmissible classes in sections 34 to 42 of
the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act for reasons of security, violating human rights, serious
criminality, general criminality, organized crime, health, financial risk and so forth (pp. 3–7). By
employing telematics, CBSA officers are able to reduce the transmission of data to zero. Dividuals
(particularly in the case of lookouts) are produced in advance, including through aggregated risk
information gleaned from third-party data collection, other agency intelligence information and
private citizen ‘tips’. Officers scan identity documents into databases and obtain histories in advance
in the form of dividuals in return. The officer essentially has no choice in terms of action with
mandatory referrals—the narrative of the individual is rendered irrelevant by the risky dividual (and
incompatible password) visible on the officer’s screen.When border officers ask individuals questions
related to their travel and associated declarations, agents are not asking questions to the individual
(the body) to provide a narrative toward making a determination regarding mobility. Instead, officers
are asking questions to the individual to essentially test the risk level of the dividual. Even if the
individual provides low-risk answers to queries, the high-risk dividual identified by IPIL databases
mandates a referral with the assumption that the person is deceiving the agent and is not being
forthcoming. As such, a high-risk dividual with a ‘hit’ in the database (as outlined above) will always
result in a referral for further processing (regardless of how the individual answers questions) (CBSA
2015: 20–22). Conversely, if an individual provides high-risk answers despite their dividual presenting as
a low or unknown risk, they are also highly likely to be referred by the agent to test (and refine if
necessary) the information contained in the dividual. Basically, the only way an individual is allowed to
proceed without further scrutiny is if the low-risk answers they provide to questions confirm their
low-risk dividual. Subsequent secondary customs and immigration searches and questioning serve to
further ‘test’ and refine (as necessary) the dividual. In short, the ‘fate’ of travellers has been coded in
databases and is largely determined before they reach physical borders or answer questions posed by
officers. Additionally, most of the interactions occurring between border agents and individuals are
coded and pre-determined in many ways. Officers ask a variety of pre-determined, mandatory
questions designed (as stated above) to test the level of risk generated by the dividual. The social
interactions that ensue cannot be described as ‘organic’ in any way. Travellers are limited in how they
may answer these questions and ultimately personal narratives—which may serve to ‘clarify’ the
individual—are excluded in favour of concise answers from which the officer may glean whether the
individual presents the same level of risk posed by their dividual. If an individual refuses to present his
or her dividual or answer questions and participate in the ‘test’, the traveller is automatically deemed
risky and referred for further examination (and potentially detained or excluded). What may appear to
the casual observer as an organic information-seeking exercise is actually a highly coded and simulated
interaction within a space of security. It is through such simulations based on advanced information
and risk that border agents can be seen as participating in ‘cyborg work’ (Bogard 1996: 115) whereby
perceived inefficiencies and problems associated with officer decision-making are designed out by
governing officers from inside the simulation—namely by coding the simulation to produce
automated responses to dividuals without allowing for officer discretion. Despite the fact CBSA officers
indicate distrust for risk technologies and insist that they ultimately make determinations by asking
questions (Côté-Boucher 2013: 172–179), it is without doubt that the life worlds (Habermas 1981) of
border agents have been colonized by risk to the extent that it is virtually impossible for officers to
reach common understandings regarding mobility without reference to the dividual.Recently, CBSA
installed machines at borders in Canada that read RFID-enabled identity documents (and call forth
dividuals) at a distance before individuals reach primary inspection (CBSA 2014: 37). Such technologies
thrust risk calculations to the forefront of the primary inspection process, and provide officers with
tailor-made risk-based decisions in advance of questioning. Where RFID readers are absent, agency
policies mandate the manual scanning of identity documents and collection of data pertaining to ‘Name
(first, middle, last), Date of Birth, Nationality/Citizenship, Gender, Document information (type, number
and country of issuance)’ as well as ‘Biographic Entry Data’ for every individual officers process (CBSA
2016). According to Chapter One Part Two ‘Primary Processing’ in the CBSA People Processing Manual,
‘All persons entering Canada at a site equipped with the IPIL system must be queried in IPIL. The officers
must query each person by capturing the information from a machine-readable travel document or by
manually keying the person’s information’ (p. 31, emphasis original). Furthermore, the introduction of
Automated Border Clearance (ABC) kiosks at Canada’s busiest international airports in Vancouver
(2009), Montreal (2012) and Toronto (2013) further indicate how Canadian borders and officer
decision-making are governed via simulations and risk. According to Chapter 10 Part 2 ‘Primary
Processing’ in the CBSA People Processing Manual, travellers scan identity documents and self-
declaration forms (E311) at ABC kiosks. The kiosks generate a risk score and referral code for the
traveller, and: he system generated results of the risk assessment and the traveler’s responses on the
E311 [form] will determine if a referral to secondary processing is warranted. The kiosk will generate a
receipt (copy of E311) and the traveler proceeds to the BSO performing document verification function
to present their travel document and kiosk receipt… The BSO shall not release travelers if a secondary
referral code is printed on the kiosk receipt but should direct the traveler to the BSO at triage (p.
151).Combined, RFID readers, policies mandating officers scan all identity documents, and ABC kiosks
produce technologies of automation that serve to double-down on computerized risk-management
practices that govern the actions of officers vis-à-vis risk within the simulation. In short, risk
management pervades and governs officer decision-making regardless of their perceived levels of
complicity. While the aforementioned analysis pertains exclusively to CBSA, the employment of risk-
management practices, databases, RFID technologies and document readers by US Customs and
Border Protection, Frontex and other Western border agencies implies these practices are likely
widespread. Additionally, the strength of the simulation metaphor for the governance of mobility and
borders lies in its direct applicability not only to CBSA and other border agencies, but also to other
fields of policing and security. Examples of such security simulation can be found in disaster and
resilience planning scenarios that completely obscure the distinction between real and fake while
supporting goals of maximal security and deterrence in making life programmatic (see, e.g., Anderson
2010; Walklate et al. 2012; Bourbeau 2013; Coaffee 2013). Whether security actors are participating in
scenarios or ‘real-world’ events, their actions and behaviour in each case become indistinguishable
and guided through risk. O’Malley (2010) documents the increased use of ‘telemetric policing’ models
such as traffic light cameras issuing fines to drivers through license plate databases. Such modes of
policing replace the individual with the dividual as the focal point of power within ‘simulated space’.
Accordingly, such simulations ultimately serve to produce ‘simulated justice’ whereby individuals are
no longer permitted recourse. In fact, the individual need not even be physically present at the time of
the offence to be fined, with ‘deeming provisions’ within legislation placing a reverse onus on the
‘offender’ to prove ‘either that the vehicle was not speeding or that another dividual owned or drove it
at the time of the offence’ (O’Malley 2010: 800). Similarly, many policing agencies have now adopted
intelligence-led policing models driven by data collection. Initiatives like the Royal Canadian Mounted
Police Criminal Intelligence Program function by collating information from investigations and ‘other
sources’ (i.e. phone records, bank statements, ISP data and other third-party data) which is ultimately
analysed by criminal intelligence analysts to produce threat assessments (RCMP 2014). Such models of
policing are inherently simulated and operate within the society of control in that, once again, the
dividual serves as the unit of analysis in terms of identifying and acting on risk. Lastly, ASBOs, licensing
(Valverde 2003, 2012), zoning (Valverde 2011; Hubbard and Colosi 2012; Crofts et al. 2013) and recent
innovations such as off-limits orders (Beckett and Herbert 2008; Palmer and Warren 2014) are employed
in urban environments to control conduct vis-à-vis employing logics of risk and computerization in
excluding dividuals from mobility within various public and private social spaces. Simply put, simulation
not only characterizes how contemporary borders are governed, but rather is symptomatic of
governance efforts generally within the society of control. Such reliance on technology and risk in
producing simulations is troubling for several reasons. Simulations ultimately unfold at the will of
software programmers. Taylor (2003), in examining virtual worlds, concludes that a simulated
environment exists the way it does because a human being coded it to be so. The dangers for humans
in terms of border simulations are easily identifiable. In short, mobility is only permitted insofar as it
meets the ‘embedded values’ (Taylor 2003: 28) promoted in a simulation’s coding. Such embedded
values (including just what is considered ‘risky’) can be changed at the whim of the coder. In short,
virtually any dividual can be rendered risky (and thus immobile) simply by re-coding the parameters of
the simulation. Rather than risk locating the truth, what is ‘true’ becomes generated by risk, with risk
being particularly vulnerable to social definition and construction in ways that are far from scientific
or objective (Beck 1992: 22–23). This conclusion raises further concerns about data ‘function creep’
(Haggerty and Ericson 2006) and a general lack of avenues for individuals to ‘exit’ simulations or seek
judicial remedies for established risky dividuals. In short, simulations and the coding of dividuals
render as fantasy any desire to manage or conceal ‘spoiled identity’ (Goffman 1963).
 Mobility
Mobility disciplines the mobile—migrants attempt to self-regulate their labor, health,
and risk in order to remain mobile.
Salter, Professor at the School of Political Studies, University of Ottawa, 2006 (Mark B., “The Global
Visa Regime and the Political Technologies of the International Self: Borders, Bodies, Biopolitics,”
Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 31, Google Scholar, Accessed 7/9/18 GDI-GN

We have already seen the criteria by which this management of population is organized: labor, health,
and risk. To understand the way this governmentality creates populations and individuals, I will use
two of Foucault’s key ideas: biopolitics and political technologies of the individual. Foucault’s writings on the
topic of biopolitics ground this analysis. Foucault examined the concomitant evolution of industrial
and institutional techniques of modern governance through an investigation of how mobile, productive, healthy, moral
bodies were constructed, schooled, policed, and harnessed for labor. 58 His investigation of the how the penal
system in particular led into the evolution of a disciplinary society stopped at the borders of the state, but in principle can be
expanded to encompass a biopolitics of international relations: the management of international
bodies. Fundamental to the evolution of the modern state was the control over mobility of citizens ,
which Foucault illustrates architecturally in the panopticon and plague town, Timothy Mitchell within Egyptian
schools and urban architecture, and John Torpey through state passports.59 What these authors neglect is the
international aspect of this control of mobility. Following work by Barry Hindess, Nevzat Soguk, and William Walters, who
describe a structure of international management of population through the regulation of citizenship,
refugees, and stateless persons, the international control Mark B. Salter 179 of persons is just as vital to the
stability of the modern state system as the domestic control of mobility . We can see the ways in which the visa
system contributes to the definition and control of international populations: through the ascription
of biopolitical characteristics in terms of labor skill or capitalization, epidemic or health liability, and
risk or normalcy. But, how do mobile individuals come to recognize themselves as part of this population and engage in self-disciplinary
behavior? For an explanation, I turn to the moment of discretion and the construction of the confessionary complex.

Immigration controls internationalize the body, divorcing it from nationality and rights
to exploit it for productivity
Salter, Professor at the School of Political Studies, University of Ottawa, 2006 (Mark B., “The Global
Visa Regime and the Political Technologies of the International Self: Borders, Bodies, Biopolitics,”
Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 31, Google Scholar, Accessed 7/9/18 GDI-GN

The US-led war on terror has drawn attention to the relationship between the sovereign and the
body: the capture of biometric Mark B. Salter 177 information on border crossers; the creation of extralegal
zones such as Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and Sangatte, France; and the use of “extraordinary rendition” by which
US agents of state send terror suspects to illiberal states where torture is routine . As an exemplar of the
triumph of the colonial gaze, the “discovery” of Sharbat Gula in Afghanistan—the woman whose face appeared on the cover of National
Geographic magazine and who since 1985 has been the face of UNHCR—was touted as emblematic of the liberation of the female body from
the strictures of Islamic fundamentalism that was the result of the US invasion.52 At
the remote Woomera detention center,
asylum seekers engaged in lip-sewing and other “disturbing practices” to direct international
attention to their plight.53 Uday and Qusay Hussein’s dead bodies were displayed to world audiences
as visible evidence of the “progress” of the US invasion of Iraq .54 In this context it is especially necessary
for us to take seriously work that has been done to engage with the scholarship now often known as the “corporeal turn” in
which the body, the socialeconomic-political conditions of embodied subjectivity, and the relationship
between the body and the body politic are taken as important sites of political struggles. The history of the body politic
is inextricably intertwined with the history of the political body; this is also the case with international society and our international bodies. Kam
Shapiro, for example, has examined the “reciprocal entanglement of politics and bodies.” 55 His “political
somatics” provide a productive lens through which to view Hegel and Schmitt’s theories of sovereignty and the
marshalling of the body as a political resource. I argue that it is necessary to engage in an analysis of
the ways in which bodies are constructed not only in relationship to a single sovereign, but also as bodies that negotiate
mobile subjectivities with respect to more than one sovereign , a process that conditions the ways in
which we understand ourselves as international bodies. This corporeal turn has been taken by a number of theorists:
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler, Mary Douglas. Because I am interested here in the ways that power is
manifest through the networks of power/knowledge in play at the border crossing, I will focus on the work of Foucault. Manyof
Foucault’s works can be seen as investigating the body. The body is also directly involved in a political
field; power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force
it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs . This political investment of the body is 178
The Global Visa Regime: Borders, Bodies, Biopolitics bound up, in accordance with complex reciprocal relations, with its economic
use; it is largely as a force of production that the body is invested with relations of power and domination; but, on the other hand,
its constitution as labor power is possible only if it is caught up in a system of subjection (in which need is
also a political instrument meticulously prepared, calculated, and used); the body becomes a useful force only if it is both a
productive body and a subjected body.56 In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault argues that “the body is molded by a great
many distinct regimes; it is broken down by the rhythms of work, rest, and holidays; it is poisoned by food or values, through eating habits or
moral laws; it constructs resistances.”57 To this, I
would add that there is an internationalization of the body:
through biometric capture, the assignation of risk profiles according to race, gender, ethnic, national
and religious scripts, and the visa system within the institutions of customs and immigration controls .
The visa system as an essential component in the attempt of the state to claim a monopoly over legitimate
movement classifies mobile bodies as legitimate through the schema of production and subjection.

Visas serve the neoliberal interests of the sovereign, which retains the right to deny
migrants at any time, structuring mobility to maximize revenue and restrict
populations
Salter, Professor at the School of Political Studies, University of Ottawa, 2006 (Mark B., “The Global
Visa Regime and the Political Technologies of the International Self: Borders, Bodies, Biopolitics,”
Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 31, Google Scholar, Accessed 7/9/18 GDI-GN

The visa and passport systems are tickets that allow temporary and permanent membership in the
community. In this structure, the fundamental right of the sovereign is to be able to exclude and
define the limits of its population with little reference to other states or sovereigns. Mobility is structured
in terms of entry, which is made obligatory by citizenship or refugee status, or entirely the
discretionary by noncitizenship. I want to unpack this discretionary moment that is vital to the delimitation of the population of the
state. From the French visé, meaning having been seen, the visa refers to “(1) the authorisation given by
a consul to enter or to pass through a country, and (2) the stamp placed on the passport when the holder entered or left a foreign
country.”37 In modern usage, it refers to the prescreening of travelers and represents a prima facie case for
admission.38 The visa in no way guarantees actual admission , which remains the prerogative of the
sovereign and its agents at the border. The visa regime allows for a delocalization of the border function so
that states may engage in sorting behavior away from the physical limit of the state .39 In some instances,
visas may be applied for and received at the actual border of a state, but in such cases it is viewed mostly
as a revenue generator rather than a security function. Paralleling my earlier work in Rights of Passage, in which I examined the
governmental problems to which a passport was an administrative solution, it is
important to detail the way in which the
contemporary visa system has been built in response to (apparent and real) failures . As the British Passport
Office states, “The British passport and visa system as it now is, has been built up as the result of practical
experience gained during and since the war and is applied in a practical spirit, in the light of conditions
which exist in the world today.”40 This method of international political sociology, whereby the practices and beliefs of actors are
taken into account in the consideration of public and international policies, pays close attention to the importance of experience.
 Economic Migration
The affirmative is advanced liberalism which mystifies the way in which the neoliberal
soverign will use the aff to exploit the migrant and justify other forms of subjugation
Sparke, M. B. (2006), ‘A Neoliberal Nexus: Economy, Security and the Biopolitics of Citizenship on the
Border’, Political Geography, p. 6-7 GDI - JM

Taking my cue from Foucault's own work on the so-called biopolitical production of self-governing
citizen-subjects in modern prisons, clinics, classrooms and so on, my suggestion in what follows is that
we can usefully examine the context contingent transnationalization of civil citizenship - including
how it is shaped by countervailing nationalistic forces - by focusing on the particular spaces of border
management technologies. The jargon of biopolitics is useful in this respect because it points to what
the recoding of citizenship through border discipline can tell us about the assumptions, attitudes, and
abilities associated with the more general neoliberal refashioning of civil citizenship. Biopolitics for
Foucault included both discourses about the self-governing subject and the actual production of self-
governed life within particular modern spaces. Some of the governmentality literature that supposedly
follows in his footsteps has not always addressed both these aspects of biopolitics. Nikolas Rose's
depiction of 'advanced liberalism', for example, offers such an abstract discursive account of the self-
government of the entrepreneurial subject that the nitty-gritty activities of biopolitical production
under neoliberalism disappear from view. Partly this is because he associates neoliberalism more with
ideology than government practices, and partly this appears to be because he wants to avoid an epochal
account of historical transition from an age of liberalism to an age of neoliberalism. However, his
disembodied account is also ironically indicative of a structuralism that he disavows. Thus, as Larner
cautions, "without analyses of the 'messy actualities' of particular neo-liberal projects, those working
within this analytic run the risk of precisely the problem they wish to avoid - that of producing
generalized accounts of historical epochs" (Larner, 2000: 14). Here, therefore, I want to explore the
messy actualities of the development of the NEXUS lane as a way of examining in a more grounded way
the convolutions, contradictions and countervailing forces surrounding the neoliberalization of
citizenship in contemporary North America. In underlining the reterritorialization of the resulting civil
citizenship and by therefore highlighting how the 'new normal' - as Davina Bhandar (2004) calls it - of
this neoliberalized citizenship is distinctively transnational in scope, I also want to point towards the
parallel transnationalization of the new abnormal too. As a result, I complement and conclude this
study by exploring how NAFTA region neoliberalization also entails new forms of exceptionalism: new
exclusionary exceptions from citizenship that are based upon older raciological imaginations of nation,
but which work through new techniques of expedited and transnationalized alienation that expel so-
called 'aliens' as quickly as business travelers can now buy fast passage across the NAFTA region's
internal borders.

Expansions of legal economic migration entail the proliferation and development of

technological means of verifying eligibility to work which effectively weaponizes the
workplace against migrants as a whole
Goldstein, Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University, and Alonso-Bejarano, doctoral
candidate in Women s and Gender Studies, at Rutgers University, 2017 (Daniel M., Carolina, “E-Terrify:
Securitized Immigration and Biometric Surveillance in the Workplace,” Human Organization; Oklahoma
City Vol. 76, Iss. 1, Spring 2017, Proquest, Accessed 7/7/18 GDI-GN)

In this article, we
examine the biopolitical regulation of immigrant behavior through another form of
"social reproduction-specific policing," this one centered on the immigrant workplace. We base our conclusions
on insights gained through an activist approach to anthropological research,2 one that combines ethnographic fieldwork with engaged
participation in the struggles of our counterparts in the field, the undocumented workers of central New Jersey and their advocates. Here, our
focus is a web-based biometric technology called E-Verify, which allows employers to determine their
applicants' and current workers' eligibility to work in the United States. Since the passage of the
Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986, federal law has prohibited employers from knowingly
hiring people not authorized to work in this country. Meanwhile, lawmakers have struggled to balance the
popular demand to protect the nation from the perceived immigrant threat with the demands of
United States capital, which requires a steady supply of inexpensive, undocumented labor (Zlolniski 2006). E-Verify
serves these contradictory interests. An instrument for what is known as worksite employment
eligibility enforcement (Newman et al. 2012), E-Verify polices immigrants in the nation's interior while
heightening the daily fear with which they live. The technology introduces the threat of deportation
into the jobsite by promising to reveal the presence of an undocumented worker to the state. It instills
fear in undocumented workers, discouraging them from pursuing their rights as workers while granting
employers new disciplinary powers to pacify workers who threaten to do so (compare with previous studies, e.g. Heyman 1998; Zlolniski 2003).
As a biometric tool, E-Verify--more
effectively than previous legal efforts at worksite regulation; see the
historical discussion below--deputizes private-sector employers as immigration control officers,
empowering them to determine who is and who is not eligible to work and whether or not to expose
the ineligible to the gaze of the state (Stumpf 2012). The technology sorts laboring bodies by their legal status, augmenting
undocumented workers' vulnerability to exploitation without actually removing them from the space of the United States. At the same time, E-
Verify conveys to the citizen public the appearance that the government is "serious" about immigration enforcement. Through
E-Verify,
the workplace becomes another site of immigrant surveillance and recognition, exploiting
undocumented people's "legal nonexistence" to enhance their vulnerability and submissiveness (Coutin
2003; Heyman 2001; Horton 2015). E-Verify signals legislators' compliance with the politically popular goal of
deporting all undocumented immigrants while maintaining the increasingly precarious sub-class of non-citizen workers
required by United States business interests (Figure 1).

Legal economic migration interiorizes the border, utilizing technology and bureaucracy
to police and discipline the migrant workforce
Goldstein, Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University, and Alonso-Bejarano, doctoral
candidate in Women s and Gender Studies, at Rutgers University, 2017 (Daniel M., Carolina, “E-Terrify:
Securitized Immigration and Biometric Surveillance in the Workplace,” Human Organization; Oklahoma
City Vol. 76, Iss. 1, Spring 2017, Proquest, Accessed 7/7/18 GDI-GN)

The border surrounding the territory of the United States has been interiorized . As efforts intensify to police
immigration in the name of creating national security, the locus of securitization has become the spaces within
national borders, including states and local municipalities . The workplace, too, has been transformed
into a site of immigration enforcement through the use of an electronic program called "E- Verify," a biometric
system that identifies those eligible to work legally in the United States . With this technology, immigration
enforcement-more effectively than ever before-deputizes private sector employers as immigration
police, while it generates fear among the undocumented. This article examines this technology as a
form of biopolitical regulation of the undocumented and its role in intensifying employment precarity
among undocumented Latin American workers in central New Jersey. E-Verify, we argue, is a biopolitical tool for
"soft" immigration enforcement that works in concert with "hard" geopolitical border control in order
to balance the competing political priorities of deporting the undocumented while maintaining a
disciplined undocumented workforce in the United States. E-Verify screens out ineligible workers while
neither detaining nor removing them from national space; it shapes consciousness and bodily praxis without providing the
recognition that might convey rights or underwrite claims for citizenship or national belonging.

Bureaucratic methods of data capture and analysis represent a depoliticized shift of

identification practices on the border
Vaughan-Williams, Professor of International Security and Head of the Department of
Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick, 2010 (Nick, “The UK border
security continuum: virtual biopolitics and the simulation of the sovereign ban,” Environment and
Planning D: Society and Space, 4/26/10, pg.s 4-6, https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/people/vaughan-
williams/publications/nvw_uk_border_security_continuum_epd_10.pdf, Accessed 7/9/18, GDI-JV)
A further characteristic of the UK's new border security doctrine is a particular focus on risk-based identity management: ``We want...to fix people's identities at the
earliest point practicable, checking them through each stage of their journey, identifying those presenting a risk and stopping them coming to the UK'' (Home Office,
2007, page 3). ``Our work to strengthen our borders and related work on the National Identity Scheme will also help in disrupting terrorist travel and restricting the
use of false and multiple identities by terrorists'' (Cabinet Office, 2008, page 27). ``The National Identity Scheme will provide a secure way to safeguard personal
identities from misuse, and will `lock'a person's biographic information to their unique facial and fingerprintbiometrics on a National Identity'' (Home Office,2009,
page 107). Whereas paper-based passports and visas allow for identity fraud and the use of false aliases, it is argued that new
forms of biometrics
``lock applicants into an identity at the earliest possible point in their journey, allowing authorities to
track more easily their previous and future dealings with the UK'' (Cabinet Office, 2007, pages 32^33). By checking biometric
data against immigration and asylum databases, it is then possible to both cross reference back to any previous application and discover histories of criminality to
refuse travel (Cabinet Office, 2007, page 33). Such data are defined as ``information about external characteristics'' and can include fingerprinting and features of
the iris or any part of the eye (UK Borders Act, 2007, page 10). Importantly, while these systems are designed in part to deter some travellers deemed to be
illegitimate, they perform a double function in terms of easing the journey of trusted others. `Project Iris', for example, is a biometrically controlled automated
border entry system that enables preregistered passengers to``proceed through automated gates attheborder rather than queuing to present their passport to an
officer at the control'' (Cabinet Office, 2007, page 42).(3) The development of identity capture and management systems has relied heavily on private enterprise and
investment. With a step change in both the intensity and scope of border security measures, new business opportunities have emerged around homeland defence
creating a multimillion-pound industry. Contracts for designing and delivering the technological infrastructure necessary for the UK government's border
transformation programme were put out for tender in 2007 and have been won by global multinational corporations such as BT, Thales, Detica, and Raytheon.(4)
For example, the defence firm Thales International has developed second-generation digital identity technologies designed to supersede current paper-based
documentation.(5) Whereas the latter is based on a static capture of physical identity typically valid for only ten years and reliant on trust, the former provides
continuously updated forms of identity capture using biometry and cryptography. The identity life cycle of the citizen is reflected in the life cycle of the identity
smartcards, which automatically register changes in physical appearance and status (eg if someone has married, divorced, or had children) and enable continually
evolving `live histories'of the subject. Detica, a UK-based digital intelligence company, has designed an identity management system, NetReveal, able to discover
different entities (people, places, vehicles, phones, etc) and relationships between them over time. Historical
behaviour is contrasted with
current behaviour, and high-risk changes are identified to alert the system operative to a potential
threat. A map of activities, such as financial transactions, web bookings, and travel histories, can be
compiled using billions of records from different agencies in order to build up a dynamic profile of
individuals or groups. The stated aim of the NetReveal software is to allow data to`drive' the analysis in order to render networks of activity more
visible than they would otherwise be due to the sheer volume of data. Applying this system to border security means that

``groups of related identities can be identified, correlated with known threats, and intercepted at the
border before the threat can enter the country'' (Detica, 2009, page 4). What is clear is that the concept of
identity is absolutely central to both government and corporate visions of the new UK border
doctrine. The common approach, however, is not one that sees entities as having a single, fixed, static
identity reducible to an immutable physical core. Rather, there is a more sophisticated understanding
of the contingency, instability, and fundamental heterogeneity of identities at work, which is
recognised as necessitating a far more multifaceted and dynamic response. In this way the evolving
`live history' of the Thales smartcard takes as its starting point the constant becoming of the subject.
Indeed, according to Paul Fenton, Business Development Director of Thales, the pertinent question is not `What is identity?' but
rather `How is identity being used'? Emphasis given to identity management and the offshoring of bordering practices points to the
emergence of a broader principle that has come to underpin the UK's new border doctrine: that of preemption. The ` traditional border

philosophy' relied on the identification of threats at a single flash point lasting for only one or two
minutes at ports, airports, and other conventional border crossings. This approach to border management has been
criticised precisely for not acting early enough to prevent the `wrong' sort of travellers to the UK:``it can be too lateöthey have achieved their goal in reaching our
shores'' (Home Office, 2007, page 3). By contrast, as we have already considered, the vision for the new UK border doctrine is one that involves prior intervention
before perceived threats depart for the UK in the first place (Home Office, 2007). The five foundations for the new doctrine, as outlined in Security in a Global Hub,
are: (1) act early, (2) target activity, (3) manage bottlenecks, (4) maximise depth and breadth of protection, and (5) reassure and deter (Cabinet Office, 2007).The
attempt to prevent `risky' subjects from embarking on their journey to the UK relates explicitly to the first of these foundations: ``the most effective...way of
addressing risks to the UK is to identify those movements which present a threat and to stop or control them before they reach the UK'' (Cabinet Office, 2007, page
9). As per Brown's ``Statement on security'', preemptive bordering precisely constitutes the first `ring of defence' envisaged by the UK government (Home Office,
2006, page 6). On this basis, preemption involves gathering information and identifying risk before travel begins:``The earlier that risk is identified and can be acted
on, the greater the chance of it being successfully resolved, and the less it usually costs to do so'' (Cabinet Office, 2007, page 48). Moreover, innovations in biometric
forms of data capture, together with the rolling out of the new e-Borders Programme, are also designed to use deterrence as a form of preemption: ``In addition to
the opportunities to collect data and intervene, border controls represent an important opportunity to deter criminality'' (Cabinet Office, 2007, page 53). Although it
is recognised that the effectiveness of deterrence of this kind is difficult to measure, it is nevertheless considered to be just as (if not more) important than more
formal methods of bordering: ``Border controls should...strike a balance between actions to improve the effectiveness behind the scenesösuch as information and
intelligence sharing leading to targeted activityöand actions that provide a visible presence at certain key locations'' (Cabinet Office, 2007, page 54). The principle of
preemption also connects with the second of the five foundations above since the targeting of activity involves the prior construction of risk profiles out of ``a single
pool of information about suspect identities and risky individuals'' (Cabinet Office, 2007, page 48). Yet,
while official documentation makes
frequent reference to the importance of `intelligence-led risk management', it remains unclear
precisely on what grounds an individual or group is deemed `risky' under the new border doctrine.
Indeed, the criteria on which decisions about the legitimacy of travellers are made are not available to
the public and few clues are given in the policy literature. On the one hand, assurances have been made that the level of harm
posed by individuals will be determined by `reliable' forms of intelligence: ``Our ultimate vision is to use intelligence, risk assessment and analysis to apply scrutiny
based on individual risk rather than nationality'' (Home Office, 2007, page 9, emphasis added). On the other hand, there is a problematic presumption that those
from inside the European Economic Area (EEA) are somehow more likely to be low-risk `trusted travellers' than non-EEA nationals (Home Office, 2006, page 11;
2007, page 5). Perhaps more significant is the scope for prejudice based on perception and mere suspicion alone. One method of data collection for the purposes of
risk profiling is simply ``the way things look and people behave'' (Cabinet Office, 2007, page 50). As has already been examined in different contexts, the concern is
that this sort of generalised suspicion translates all too easily into racialised modes of perception in the context of the global `war on terror' (Amoore, 2007; Butler,
2004; Pugliese, 2006). Further still,
although perhaps decisions need to be made about the legitimacy of not only
certain travellers but also services and goods in circulation, an approach based upon risk profiling and
suspicion alone raises significant ethical/political questions. A mode of preemption based upon
racialised stereotyping and/or algorithmic logics eliminates decision making about individual cases.
Such a move has the obvious advantage of speed, which is seen as vital to the `customer experience'of those deemed to be legitimate (Cabinet Office, 2007, page
55). Nevertheless,it marks a significant departure from slower evidence-based practices that build
nuanced pictures and lead to judgments on a case-by-case basis. Instead, attempts are made at
calculating the future through generalised and bureaucratic methods of data capture and analysis.
This depoliticisation of the circumstances under which people travelling to the UK are risk assessed,
categorised, and treated is, of course, itself a highly political move, albeit one buried beneath the
seemingly neutral language of technocratic and commercial practices.
 Economic Migration – Skilled Worker Visas
The importation of highly-skilled migrants furthers US imperialism: labor is brought to
the US and exploited all in the name of the US’s unquestioned right to control global
resources.
Tannock 2009 [Stuart, “White Collar Imperialisms: the H-1B debate in America,” Social Semiotics 19.3]
This internationalization was driven, in part, by a second fundamental shift over the course of the 1990s:
the rise of a global war for talent (Kuptsch and Fong 2006). Nation-states around the world have
increasingly opened their borders to highlyskilled immigrants, and have actively sought to recruit
high-level professional and managerial workers and students from overseas (OECD 2006). This war for
talent is driven in large part by the United States: US think-tanks and ideologues are at the forefront
of trumpeting the benefits of liberalizing the global movement of high-skill labor; and US immigration
policy reforms such as the 1990 creation of the H-1B visa itself have become models for other
countries to imitate. Further, the United States is the world’s number-one talent magnet: with just 5%
of the world’s population, it attracts about one-half of the college-educated migrants who come to the
rich OECD countries (its closest competitor, Canada, pulls in 13% of these immigrants) (Docquier and
Marfouk 2005, 168). To be economically competitive in the global economy, business and political elites
now argue, it is imperative to recruit the world’s most talented individuals, from wherever they come.
Since other nations are also competing for these same workers (as well as for one’s own set of domestic
skilled workers), nations must continually adjust their immigration, education, economic and social
policy to make themselves more welcoming and appealing to them. The global war for talent puts into
play a game of perpetual one-upmanship, in which political and business leaders of all nations insist they
have no choice but to compete (Florida 2005; Shachar 2006; Wooldridge 2006). Thus, when Compete
America (a group that bills itself as a ‘‘coalition of corporations, educators, research institutions and
trade associations committed to advancing public policies that enable US employers to hire and retain
the world’s best talent’’; Compete America 2007) released a series of ads in 2007 calling for expansion of
the H-1B and other skilled worker visa programs, the issue of labor shortage was hardly present at all. In
one advert, Compete America raises the specter of losing out on the talents of foreign-born college
students who had been trained in American universities, but would be forced to work for overseas
competitors due to arbitrary caps on the H-1B visas that could be used to hire them in the United States
(Figure 1). In another advert, the coalition warns that a new ‘‘Blue Card’’ to be introduced by the
European Union for skilled immigrants will soon enable Europe to out-compete the United States ‘‘for
the world’s brightest and most innovative minds’’ if Congress does not reform its inefficient and
‘‘outdated’’ employment-based ‘‘Green Card’’ program (Figure 2). When Microsoft’s Bill Gates goes to
Washington to call on the nation’s leaders for an overhaul of the US high-skilled immigration system, he
talks not just of raising the annual cap on H-1B visas, but of removing the cap entirely. ‘‘The theory
behind the H-1B that too many smart people are coming to the US,’’ Gates said in a 2005 discussion at
the Library of Congress, ‘‘that’s what’s questionable. It’s very dangerous. You can get this idea that the
world is very scary; let’s cut back on travel . . . let’s cut back on visas’’ (quoted in McCullagh 2005). The
big-tent vision on offer here is that of a global meritocracy, in which individuals from across the globe
are to be recruited and hired solely on the basis of merit, regardless of where they come from or what
passport they hold (Tannock 2009a; Wooldridge 2006). Opponents of expanding the annual allotment of
H-1B visas, in addition to continuing to question labor shortage claims, challenge the idea that the H-1B
program is about bringing in the world’s ‘‘best and brightest’’ minds (for example, Hira 2007). They point
to a growing mass of reports suggesting that, much of the time, H-1B workers are recruited by
employers to serve as a second-class, lowerwage, temporary, captive, vulnerable and exploited
workforce (for example, Banerjee 2006; Bhattacharjee 2007; Chakravartty 2006a; Grow 2003; Reichl
2005; Varma 2002). This critique is essential, as even the government’s own Accountability Office points
to flaws and loopholes in the H-1B program that allow employers to violate the program’s ostensible
protection of labor standards (Government Accountability Office 2003, 2006). But this critique of
exploitation tends to fall short as an effective analysis and response to the increasingly globalized high-
skill US labor market on Social Semiotics 315 two counts. First, the critique is too narrow. The goal of a
globalized labor market for high-skill workers is, indeed, very often quite explicitly about reaping cost
savings that come from reducing wages (Bloomberg News 2007; Winters et al. 2002; World Bank 2003).
But it is about far more than just this. The core principle at stake in global talent war/global
meritocracy discourse is the absolute prerogative of employers to hire whoever they want whenever
they want, based solely on business need, fully liberated from the kinds of public good expectations
that have been most operationalized at the nation-state level (e.g. the expectation that employers
bear some of the cost of the public education and vocational training of their workforce, or that they
give opportunity to individuals from disadvantaged social backgrounds, etc.). H-1B visas may often be
used at the bottom ends of the high-skill labor market; but they are used at the upper levels as well (Mir,
Mathew, and Mir 2000). Control (or liberation from state and public control), not cost, is the
fundamental issue. The second limitation of the exploitation critique of the H-1B visa program is that it
is used most often by labor commentators in the United States as an excuse to exclude and banish,
rather than organize H-1B workers (Chakravartty 2006b). While the American Federation of Labor and
Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFLCIO) and other American labor organizations have come to see
the exploitation of low-skilled immigrant workers as a reason to reach out to these workers and include
them in their organizing efforts, this has distinctly not been the case with high-skilled immigrant workers
on H-1B and other work visas (AFL-CIO 2003; Freeman and Hill 2006; Lal 2003). To explain this
difference, it is necessary to look at how the H- 1B debate fits into the articulation of imperialist self-
interest on the part of the US state, capital and labor. The pro-H-1B side: perpetuating US hegemony
We’ve got to expand what’s called H-1B visas. It makes no sense to say to a young scientist in India, you
can’t come to America to help this [country] develop technologies that help us deal with our problems.
(President George W. Bush, January 2007) The aftermath of the 9/11 World Trade Center and Pentagon
attacks saw a precipitous drop in foreign entries to the United States in all visa categories, the H-1B
included (Paral and Johnson 2004). Newly-heightened concern with homeland security led to a
clampdown on all immigrant and non-immigrant visa programs: barriers to entry for non-citizens were
raised, based on political and racial profiling; there was an upsurge in the surveillance, harassment and
deportation of non-citizens already in America, especially for those of Arab or Muslim background; and
noncitizens were prohibited from working on ‘‘sensitive technology’’ areas in US universities and
laboratories (Doumani 2006; Fernandes 2007). Yet the 9/11 attacks had another effect, and that was to
push into the open just how pivotal American business, political and academic elites saw the country’s
visa programs as being to maintaining and extending US hegemony. At the very moment that the
clampdown on non-citizens was proceeding, an alarm was being sounded on the chilling effect this could
have on US science, wealth and power. ‘‘The federal government is beginning, however unintentionally,
to dismantle an industry that we spent 50 years establishing in the conviction that the presence of
international students and scholars serves the national interest,’’ complained Victor Johnson, the
Association of International Educators Policy Advisor. Secretaries of State Colin Powell and Condoleeza
Rice both emphasized the value to foreign policy interests of educating foreign ruling elites at American
universities on F and J visas. ‘‘I can’t tell you how many times I’ve met foreign leaders and heads of state
who studied in America,’’ Rice (2006) noted: They’ve gone to community colleges, they’ve gone to small
colleges, they’ve gone to land-grant colleges, they’ve gone to research universities. They’ve all had the
common experience of . . . studying in America. And the experience then becomes one that binds them
to us in a way that can never be broken. (See also Johnson 2003; Ahmad 2004) In testimony to US
Congress, President of the National Academy of Engineering William Wulf likewise emphasized the
importance to the United States of foreignborn scientists, engineers and high-tech workers.
‘‘Throughout the last century,’’ Wulf (2005) testified: our great successes in creating both wealth and
military ascendancy have been due in large part to the fact that we welcomed the best scientists and
engineers from all over the world. . . We have been skimming the best and brightest minds from across
the globe, and prospering because of it. In 2005, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and
Medicine’s Committee on Prospering in the Global Economy of the 21st Century released their Rising
above the gathering storm report. Fittingly, the Committee was headed by Norman Augustine, former
CEO of Lockheed Martin, one of the country’s largest weapons manufacturers for the task of the
Committee was as much about seeking to build a ‘‘new American century’’ as any of America’s military
wars and occupations overseas. Augustine and his fellow Committee members warned that the United
States was facing a perfect storm that threatened to knock the legs out from under US power. One
pressing concern was the recruitment of foreign-born skilled workers. At the very moment the
increasingly liberalized global economy and labor market that the United States had long been pushing
in its own interests was emerging, America risked falling behind, due to the combination of its own
repressive visa regime, global fallout from its deeply unpopular wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the
rising competition for skilled immigrant students and workers from other nations around the world.
Congress, the Committee insisted, needed to act quickly to liberalize its visa program: increase the
number of H-1Bs offered each year; provide unlimited H-1Bs to foreign-born graduates from US
universities with PhDs in science, technology, engineering, mathematics ‘‘or other fields of national
need’’; and create a new, permanent, ‘‘skills-based, preferential immigration option’’ (National
Academies 2005, 78). In Congressional testimony in the fall of 2005, Augustine spelled out explicitly
what was at stake: Americans, with only 5% of the world’s population but with nearly 30% of the world’s
wealth, tend to believe that scientific and technological leadership and the high standard of living it
underpins is somehow the natural state of affairs. But such good fortune is not a birthright. If we wish
our children and grandchildren to enjoy the standard of living most Americans have come to expect,
there is only one answer: We must get out and compete. (Augustine 2005; original emphasis) Current
calls for expanding the H-1B visa program, then, when made by business-dominated coalitions such as
Compete America and others, have come to be linked explicitly with a project of protecting America’s
‘‘supremacy,’’ ‘‘leadership,’’ ‘‘preeminence,’’ or ‘‘edge’’ over other nations (AILA 2007; Compete
America 2007; National Academies 2005). This is thanks in part to the increasingly naked language of
US imperialism that was unleashed with the attacks of September 11 (Foster 2005). ‘‘Without more
access to H-1Bs,’’ the AILA (2007, 51) insists, ‘‘the US stands to lose rapidly not only the competitive
edge generations of Americans have worked so hard to achieve, but also its pre-eminence in a variety of
scientific and technical fields areas vital to our prosperity and national security.’’ What astonishes
about these arguments is their utterly unquestioned assumption, first, that America should have the
absolute right and ability ‘‘to hire and retain the world’s best talent’’ (Compete America 2007); and
second, as seen in the quotation of President Bush above, that foreigners should be expected to want
to help America address its problems and increase its prosperity rather than those of the countries
elsewhere around the world where their own communities and families live. Former Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld is often alleged by anti-war campaigners to have once said: ‘‘it’s not our fault
God put America’s oil under other people’s countries’’ (Galloway 2007). It is this kind of logic precisely
that generates the endlessly repeated statements that highly-skilled foreign workers should be
brought to America’s shores to buttress its position of global hegemony. The rest of the world’s
resources exist in order to service American needs and help America help itself. Whether these
resources be oil and gas or scientific and engineering talent, the ideology of imperialist self-interest
remains essentially unchanged.
 Legal Migration
Increasing immigration as “soft” regulation subjects migrants to interior biopolitics,
manipulating the behaviors of migrants through the looming fear of deportation
Goldstein, Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University, and Alonso-Bejarano, doctoral
candidate in Women s and Gender Studies, at Rutgers University, 2017 (Daniel M., Carolina, “E-Terrify:
Securitized Immigration and Biometric Surveillance in the Workplace,” Human Organization; Oklahoma
City Vol. 76, Iss. 1, Spring 2017, Proquest, Accessed 7/7/18 GDI-GN)

Coleman and Stuesse (2014) have suggested that we

consider these varied forms of immigrant policing-both within
and at the edges of national space-in terms of geopolitics and biopolitics, concepts which scholars of
immigration typically differentiate but which here are better understood as working in concert to produce
and regulate immigrant shadow populations. Whereas border control is a geopolitical (or, for Coleman and
Stuesse, a topographical) system by which transborder movement is regulated (today through a strategy of "prevention through deterrence,"
which forces immigrants into rougher and more dangerous terrain , intended to discourage immigration; De León
2015), the biopolitical (or topological) regulation of immigrants reaches beyond the specific site of the
border, penetrating the interior of the nation and impacting immigrant daily life . Border geopolitics
represents a "hard" system of enforcement, involving the building of walls and detention centers and
making the United States into a "zone of confinement" (Coutin 2010), contained by razor wire, metal
fences, and concrete, and thus ever more difficult to enter (and re-enter). Interior biopolitics, on the
other hand, include "soft" forms of immigrant regulation, unlocalized and immanent , which shape the
behavior of undocumented people within the United States while dangling the continual threat of removal. "Soft" tactics of
immigrant policing include hindering immigrants' ability to drive to work or to transport their children
to school, limiting their "automobility" and making their lives more difficult (Stuesse and Coleman 2014).
Immigrants have to alter their behavior to accommodate these interventions ; and while some may elect
to "self deport" (see Kobach 2008), the majority remain in the shadows, ever more constrained in their options and
liberties. The biopolitics of immigrant control target behavior modification rather than deportation ,
threatening removal without actually removing anyone: "interior enforcement in the main," Coleman and Stuesse say
(2014:52), "works by using the looming threat of territorial banishment as a result of traffic enforcement and other
social reproduction-specific policing, in conjunction with the specter of lethal geopolitical infrastructures like the United States-Mexico border,
to regulate the ways in which resident undocumented immigrant communities learn to socially
reproduce as well as work."

So-called legal immigration intensifies the uncertainty and ambiguity in the migration
process in order to exploit vulnerable workers.
Kasli and Parla 2009 [Zeynep and Ayse, “Broken Lines of Il/Legality and the Reproduction of State
Sovereignty: The Impact of Visa Policies on Immigrants to Turkey from Bulgaria,” in Alternatives 34]

It has been widely claimed that the acceleration and intensification of globalization, especially in
conjunction with the neoliberal economic restructuring of the last few decades, poses challenges to
nation-states not only through transnational corporations and international political bodies but also
through the transnational ties migrants forge beyond national borders.1 Nonetheless, as Bauman
argues, “there seems to be an intimate kinship, mutual conditioning and reciprocal reinforcement
between the globalization of all aspects of the economy and the renewed emphasis on the territorial
principle.”2 The elective affinity between globalization and the territorial principle, or what others
have more generally described as the continuing relevance of the nation-state,3 increasingly renders
state borders and visa policies the sites of an asymmetric relationship between the sovereign state
and immigrants who develop formal and informal strategies to expand spaces for maneuver, the limits
of which are nonetheless still demarcated by the sovereign state. It has also been argued that the
reproduction of state sovereignty often utilizes the temporariness of the legal status of immigrants.4
According to Calavita’s primarily economic emphasis, the law systematically reproduces the irregularity
of migrants in order to ensure a vulnerable and dispensable workforce. The sorting of people into
categories of otherness no longer occurs on the basis of cultural or ethnic markers, but rather on their
positioning in the global economy.5 In a similar vein, King underlines that “illegality seems to be
constructed in an illogical (but perhaps cynical) way by host societies which seem to be willing to exploit
cheap migrant labor (and even be structurally dependent upon it) yet at the same time to deny the legal
and civic existence of migrants.”6 Balibar, too, points to the reproduction of illegality despite the
rhetoric of immigration control but places the emphasis on how illegality and discourses about illegality
become the raison d’étre of the security apparatus.7
 “Illegal” Immigration
The word Illegal alien serves to separate the biopolitical foreign from the ideal citizen,
subjecting them to a violent process of dehumanization
Fowler, Ph.D, Instructor at Washington State University, 2016 (Rebecca, “U.S. biopolitical Geographies
of the Migrant,” borderlands e-journal 15(1), GDI-JM)

What in fact, is racism? It is primarily a way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under
power’s control: the break between what must live and what must die. The appearance within the
biological continuum of the human race of races, the distinction among races, the hierarchy of races,
the fact that certain races are described as good and that others, in contrast, are described as inferior:
all this is a way of fragmenting the field of the biological that power controls. It is a way of separating
out the groups that exist within a population. It is, in short, a way of establishing a biological-type
caesura within a population that appears to be a biological domain. This will allow power to treat that
population as a mixture of races, or to be more accurate, to treat the species, to subdivide the species it
controls, into the subspecies known, precisely, as races. That is the first function of racism: to
fragment, to create caesuras within the biological continuum addressed by biopower. (Foucault 2003,
pp. 254-55) Racism is thus not an effect, but a tactic of state technology that is used to create
biopolitical enemies against whom society must defend itself (Stoler 1995, p. 59). In the feverish age of
neoliberal globalization, citizenship technologies have become fused with those of state racism to
fragment the biological field that biopower controls as biopolitics are played out on the bodies of
global citizens and racialized non-citizens. Within this context, the brown body of the ‘illegal alien’ has
been marked by the state as an external threat, both to society and to state sovereignty and
governmentality. Within dominant discourses, undocumented immigrants have been constructed as
‘unethical subjects … unable or unwilling to enterprise their lives or manage their own risks’ (Inda
2006, p. 108). With the rise of neoliberal rule and the ideological decree of privatized and individualized
government of risk, proper neoliberal citizens are expected to utilize market mechanisms in bearing the
responsibility for their own social security and for insuring themselves and their families against ill
fortune of poor health, accidental loss, and/or unemployment. The racialized anti-citizen’s individual
lack of resources is thus equated with a pathological irresponsibility and inability to contribute to the
wellbeing of the social body. Biopower tactics incorporate ‘anti-citizen’ regimes of truth that construct
as pathological the undesirable body of the ‘illegal alien’, associating it with crime and disease and as
a cancer that must be excised from the social body. The term ‘illegal alien’ has permeated dominant
discourse to the extent that our society has come to associate all unauthorized border crossings with
those migrants originating from south of the border. Ultimately, dominant discourses that scapegoat
the brown body of the Mexican migrant are integral to the function of state racism, not only in the
maintenance of a hegemonic U.S. citizenship and identity, but also to the production of docile migrant
bodies and the control of segregated, hierarchized populations intrinsic to the machinery of neoliberal
capitalism. Immigration scholar Nicholas de Genova has written on this phenomena, describing how
illegality has become inscribed on the brown bodies of Mexican migrants. The socio-legal production of
migrant illegality works to systematically dehumanize and exploit these brown bodies for their labor.
The term ‘illegal alien’ exacerbates migrant vulnerability in that it serves to render these people not
fully human in the minds of many Americans.
Securitization of the homeland state illegalizes millions of undocumented migrants,
producing shadow populations that seek to immobilize the “threat” through
surveillance and regulation
Goldstein, Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University, and Alonso-Bejarano, doctoral
candidate in Women s and Gender Studies, at Rutgers University, 2017 (Daniel M., Carolina, “E-Terrify:
Securitized Immigration and Biometric Surveillance in the Workplace,” Human Organization; Oklahoma
City Vol. 76, Iss. 1, Spring 2017, Proquest, Accessed 7/7/18 GDI-GN)

With the emergence in the United States of what De Genova (2007) has termed "the Homeland Security
State" and the rise of the undocumented non-citizen as the state's particular object of regulation and
control, policymakers and ordinary citizens alike now regard immigration to the United States as a major
threat to national or "homeland" security (Chavez 2008; Inda 2011). Especially since the events of September 11, 2001,
public discourse and law enforcement conflate undocumented immigrants with "terrorists ,"
constructing them as challenges to the sovereign territory of the United States who invade the country
through clandestine border crossings, most notably at the United States/Mexico frontier (Hing 2006; Miller
2005).' In addition, the undocumented are imagined as a threat to national populations , the "legal" citizens
and residents whose interests are imagined to be in direct opposition to those of the undocumented, who
are thought to steal United States jobs, overtax United States social institutions, and contaminate the
bodies and minds of United States citizens with their diseases and alien ways. All of this is captured in
the concept of "illegality," understood not merely as a legal designation but as an "existential condition,"
identifying a particular kind of person thought to be different from, and threatening to, the social mainstream
(Menjívar and Kanstroom 2015:2; see also De Genova 2002). The illegalization of millions of undocumented people
resident in the United States has produced "shadow populations," communities of the undocumented living in
distinct and separate worlds made invisible and insecure by immigration law, even as they remain important
contributors to United States economic production and consumption (Chavez 1998; Coleman and Stuesse 2014; United
States Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy 1981). United States immigration law and its enforcement
thus produce an ingenious contradiction, in which the very people who are supposed to be the cause
of national insecurity are themselves rendered among the most insecure people in national space. Meanwhile, in
response to the perceived threat posed by the undocumented, legislators have introduced a variety of laws
represented as efforts to confront the "problem" of immigration . The most visible signs of these are at
international borders, understood as the frontlines in the unending war on terror. At these geopolitical frontiers,
laws and technologies both old and new effect increased surveillance of foreigners trying to enter the United States
and enable the Customs and Border Patrol to capture and detain those apprehended crossing without
authorization (Cornelius 2004; Levi and Wall 2004; Maguire 2009; Maguire and Fussey 2016). Additionally, as the archetypal
security menace of the "Islamic terrorist" has been joined with that of the Latino day laborer, the focus of
immigration law enforcement has expanded from the nation's borders to include the spaces within those
borders. This internalization of the border is a key accompaniment to the "securitization of
immigration"-a shift in national security policy that "reconceptualizes security as the collective management
of subnational or transnational threats and the policing of borders and the internal realm , rather than just
the defense of territory against external attack" (Faist 2002:9; see also Bigo 2002; Bourbeau 2011). In the United States, this fact is
reflected in the institutional organization of government: the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)
is tasked with both combating international terrorism and enforcing national immigration law (Rodriguez
2014; Wilson 2008). So, even as the United States/Mexico border has in recent years been increasingly militarized, with clandestine border
crossings becoming ever more risky and deadly, the policing of daily life in the cities, suburbs, and small towns of
the United States has also intensified, incorporating new programs and technologies of detection and screening that allow for
greater policing of immigrant bodies and that recruit new segments of the citizen population to enforce immigration law. This raises
levels of anxiety and fear among immigrants who drive cars, send their children to school, walk the streets, or work outside
the home. And they have reason to be fearful: during its eight years in office, the Obama administration deported upwards of2,000,000 people,
numbers that are likely to increase under the Trump presidency.
 Identity-Production
Biopolitical imagnings of borders reify violent notions of nationalism
Anssi Paasi, Academy of Finland, 1-1-2012, "Border Studies Reanimated: Going beyond the
Territorial/Relational Divide," Environment and Planning A, Volume 44
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1068/a45282 - GDI John Melton

The above discussion can be abstracted into two coinciding modalities of borders. Firstly, the
institutionalization and governance of territorial spaces effected by states are typically rooted in
practices and discourses that resonate with the narratives of nation(alism) and identity. In geopolitical
terms, borders are thus related to ‘people’, ‘nation’, and ‘culture’. From this angle, the key ‘site’ of the
border is not only the borderland but also the complex, perpetually ongoing, hegemonic nation-
building process. Borders therefore resonate not only with state but also with nation, identity, and
purported loyalties. While such borders are challenged by postnational and denational processes,
mobility, and at times by ethnic upsurges, studies on (banal) nationalism display how much emotional
bordering, fear, and loyalty are mobilized through nationalized and memorialized material landscapes
like military cemeteries and monuments, or through national performances such as
flag/independence days, parades, and other elements related to national heritage, ‘purity’, and
symbolism (Paasi, 2012b). These material and symbolic practices often both maintain and ‘stretch’
borders in both time and space and are typically maintained in spatial socialization through such
institutions as media and education. Bordering at times occurs ‘invisibly’: for instance, when the media
turns the exclusive views of political elites into agendas on immigration issues and puts aside the views
and biographies of asylum seekers, refugees or the NGOs that represent them (Shah, 2008).

Border regulations invalidate theoretical conceptions of the border as a line, indicating

their convoluted and unnatural nature
Salter, Professor at the School of Political Studies, University of Ottawa, 2012 (Mark B., “Theory of
the / : The Suture and Critical Border Studies,” Geopolitics, Vol. 17, Iss. 4, October, EBSCO, Accessed
7/10/18 GDI-GN)

As Vaughan-Williams and Parker state: “[Borders] are increasingly ephemeral and/or palpable :
electronic, non-visible, and located in zones that defy a straightforwardly territorial logic .”10 A
preclearance area at an international airport illustrates both the utility of critical border studies in
undermining the traditional assumptions of geopolitics and the performativity of the border .11
Travellers are pre-screened by airline agents and border officials prior to departure on international flights, often
against no-fly lists or passenger profiles that reflect anxieties about illegal immigration and false
asylum claims, health concerns, and security threats. Traditional models of the territorial state borders are
confounded by the presence of border functions that are not at the edges of the state. State authorities,
private actors, and individuals each create the meaning for the border in its transgression: making particular claims for decision or status.
Critical border studies refer to these processes as both debordering and rebordering : Sparke explains this as
the “discontinuity between the repeated, often reactive, rearticulations of the territorialized nation-state on the one hand and the neoliberal
transnationalizing of the state on the other,”12 borrowing from Appadurai’s notion of “disjuncture”.13 The
Gordian legal status of
preclearance areas is often complex and unclear, different from claims to entry or status on the
territory of the state. While (admission, identity, or status) claims made on the territory of the state are within
the law, claims made from without are abandoned from the law , and thus even when debordered or rebordered, the
performance of the state border has a profound effect.14 The romantic nostalgia for the border as a line indicates its
weakness as a theoretical tool.15
 Medical Admission Standards
Biomedical tests reproduce biopolitical citizenship, determines social legitimacy and
rights on the included while systematically excluding unwanted populations
Lakhani, Sociologist of Immigration, and Timmerman, professor of sociology at the University of
California, Los Angeles, 2014 (Sarah M., Stefan, “Biopolitical Citizenship in the Immigration Adjudication
Process,” Social Problems, Vol. 61, No. 3, August, Proquest, Accessed 7/8/18 GDI-GN)

(Foucault 1978; Rose 2007). The

configuration of biomedical tests and medical authorities in legalization
procedures gives rise to highly consequential assessments that shape immigrants’ lives , the
implementation of immigration law, and the notion of citizenship itself (Fassin and Rechtman 2009; Ticktin 2011;
Willen 2011). While we recognize that “citizenship” is also a legal category, we invoke the language of citizenship in this article to refer to the
full or partial incorporation of individuals into the national polity through state-derived biopolitical criteria (Epstein 2007). Biopolitical
citizenship refers to a mode of claiming rights that individuals may undertake vis-à-vis the state and to
a mode of granting rights that states may undertake vis-à-vis individuals, both based on biomedical
criteria. The content and consequences of biopolitical citizenship differ depending on whether it is
mobilized by individuals or imposed by the state ; a mandatory or optional way of becoming or being a citizen; and
facilitative of partial or full citizenship. In addition, biopolitical citizenship varies in the extent to which it bestows
rights and responsibilities on included populations . We argue that when biopolitical citizenship enters the
immigration context, the policy logic of sorting aspiring citizens on biomedical criteria produces
stratifying effects depending on how biomedicine and politics intersect in adjudicative evaluations and
decisions. Immigration policies intend to sort aspiring citizens using inclusion and exclusion criteria. However, integrating biopolitical
citizenship criteria into legalization procedures functions to distinguish people not only based on
biomedical techniques but also on how these same techniques become implemented within broader
healthcare and migration bureaucracies. These effects of biomedical measures systematically exclude
some people from citizenship. In response, immigrants and their advocates may try to counter some of the exclusionary
consequences. This article addresses two research questions. When and how does the U.S. state request biological evidence from immigrant
petitioners, and vice versa, when and how do immigrants and their lawyers employ biological status in making citizenship claims? What are the
consequences of biopolitical citizenship in the U.S. legalization process? We investigate the stratifying effects of two salient biomedical
technologies in the contemporary U.S. legalization process: medical examinations and DNA testing. These technologies differ depending on
whether they are mandatory or voluntary and thus lend themselves to different opportunities for biological citizenship mobilization and
resistance. They
also offer a biological basis for different criteria of legalization: the medical examination
relates to the immigrant petitioner’s health, while DNA testing takes the immigrant’s family as an
object of inquiry. We aim to bridge literature on international migration and citizenship with inquiries germane to medical sociology and
the sociology of science. Our analysis of biopolitical citizenship in U.S. immigration law advances scholarship on sociolegal citizenship by
building on conceptualizations of immigration control that center on policy implementation via intermediary mechanisms, institutions, and
social actors (Coutin 2000; Fassin and d’Halluin 2005; Gilboy 1991; Lakhani forthcoming; Marrow 2009; Menjívar and Abrego 2012). By
analyzing how one group of intermediaries, attorneys, serve as brokers in the context of biomedical
screening evaluations, we configure immigration lawyers as “agents and critics of law” (Coutin 2000:104;
emphasis added). Immigration lawyers are agents of law in how their brokering work involves interpreting
and applying existing legal statutes, regulations, and requirements of the state to immigrants’ lives. Lawyers’ capacity to
facilitate immigrants’ legal inclusion resides in their alignment with the U.S. state , as professionals trained in
its rules. Yet by strategically laboring to enfranchise those who are not state members, lawyers can also
be conceptualized as critics of law (Coutin 2000; Lakhani forthcoming). Biopolitical citizenship specifically calls attention to the
role of biomedical authorities and technologies in initiating, reproducing, and transforming practices of social stratification that produce
inclusion and exclusion. The concept goes beyond the traditional medical sociology approach of “medicalization,” which sees a gradual
expansion of medical definitions and practices to solve social problems (Conrad 2007). Biopolitical citizenship, in contrast,
emphasizes the mutual metamorphoses of politics and medicine through their interaction , keeping in
mind that biomedicine is and always has been political (Clarke et al. 2003). Concerns about fairness,
democracy, and distribution come sharply into view when existing biomedical technologies are
employed not just to screen for health risks but also to confer legal and social legitimacy upon populations (Foucault
1976; Illich 1976; Zola 1972).
 Documentation (Confess)
Immigration regulations force migrants into the confessionary complex, entirely
subject to the violence of the state in hopes of assimilating into the nation
Salter, Professor at the School of Political Studies, University of Ottawa, 2006 (Mark B., “The Global
Visa Regime and the Political Technologies of the International Self: Borders, Bodies, Biopolitics,”
Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 31, Google Scholar, Accessed 7/9/18 GDI-GN

This part of the mechanism for the creation of the modern subject who knows himself in relation to
the confessionary state is a function of “unconditional obedience, uninterrupted examination, and exhaustive
confession” and “appears as an indispensable component of the government of men by each other .”61
Though not traced by Foucault himself, the confessionary complex (obedience, examination, confession) provides
a crucial link between the “political economy of the body”62 and the biopolitical governmentality of
international management of populations. It is not simply that the international population is managed, but that we come
to manage ourselves through the confessionary complex. Foucault 180 The Global Visa Regime: Borders, Bodies,
Biopolitics describes the importance of “the way by which, through some political technology of individuals, we have been led to
recognize ourselves as a society, as a part of a social entity, as a part of nation or of a state .”63 Balibar
relates the governmental function of the border as the limit of community to the process of identity-formation:
“The normality of the national citizen-subject . . . is also internalized by individuals, as it becomes a
condition, an essential reference of their collective, communal sense , and hence of their identity. . . . As a
consequence, borders cease to be purely external realities.”64 The confessionary complex is a structure framed by law
and instantiated in various practices at the border (and in the faces of agents of the state). This is
doubly true in the case of terrorism, which is not viscerally visible . The exceptional application of law in this instance
is also revealing of the weakness of Agamben in explaining the moment of decision. In US vs. Montoya de Hernandez, the
Supreme Court held that for offense for which there will be “no external signs…inspectors will rarely
possess probably cause to arrest or search, yet governmental interests in stopping smuggling at the
border are high indeed.”65 As with general searches at the border, the standard of probable cause is held in
abeyance at the body/border. Terror is similar to alimentary canal smuggling (swallowing balloons of cocaine in
this instance), in that the signs of the bad intent are secondary: nervousness, discomfort, anxiety. This confessionary complex is
also written on the body in terms of embodied anxiety and the signs of untruth : “a . . . mechanism of shame
that makes one blush at expressing any bad thought.”66 Thus, reasonable suspicion must be visible not only in the
body but in the mind of a border guard. The examination at the border is a corporeal documentary
affair. As Gillian Fuller suggests, “States don’t deal with strange peculiarities of networked and virtualised
individuals, they prefer to keep the subject within the more knowable constraints of identity .”67 Thus, at
the border the document is compared to the body which is compared to the story. If the isomorphism between this body-dossier-narrative
tests the guard’s credibility, exclusion looms.

Immigration restrictions forces migrants to self-police, adopting auto-confession to

conform their speech and identity to docile model population
Salter, Professor at the School of Political Studies, University of Ottawa, 2006
(Mark B., “The Global Visa Regime and the Political Technologies of the International Self: Borders,
Bodies, Biopolitics,” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 31, Google Scholar, Accessed 7/9/18 GDI-GN

These social scripts are reached through the auto-confession of the body , through the presumption in
training that the examined body will confess even if the soul is reluctant . This auto-confession 182 The
Global Visa Regime: Borders, Bodies, Biopolitics happens through the interpretation of body, face, teeth, clothes,
posture, and language skills as evidence of class, social group, ethnicity, gender, sexuality . It also is
assumed to happen through the examination process. Psychologist Paul Ekman trains law enforcement officials and
others in his theory of “micro-expressions,” by which interrogators can learn the self-confessing secrets of facial
expressions that last one twenty-fifth of a second. 76 Training for Canada Customs agents in the past has focused on this
kind of visual acuity, described by one agent as training in “one of these things is not like the other.” Other
technologies on offer to the security apparatus of the state include heat cameras that detect blush
responses around the eyes during deception and motion sensors that detect awkward or abnormal
movement. Thus, a corporeal lens makes visible to us the ways in which the body comes to testify,
along with our documents, about our intentions, character, utility, moral quality, and social and
economic origins. If we do not confess in a way that echoes with the story that the examiner has told him/herself about us, then we are
suspect. The confessionary dynamic is illustrated by the ubiquitous “no joking” rule now posted at most
airports. In the words of the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority, “you should never joke or
make ‘small talk’ about bombs, firearms or other weapons while going through pre-board
screening.”77 Small talk and jokes are dangerous because they express untruths. But border examiners rely on the anxiety of the passenger
and themselves to affect obedience, examination, and confession. Like doctors, judges, and teachers, we must all tell the
truth to agents of the state: not just the truth from a certain point of view, but the whole, entire,
selfpolicing truth. These regulations against joking and small talk train travelers to self-police their
speech and behavior to present a low-risk profile toward the authority figure. The ritual of obedience,
confession, and examination thus binds the mobile subject to the sovereign, but does not accord him/her rights.
 Citizenship Links
Rights of citizenship regulate populations—the right to a nationality produces surplus
international populations deemed refugee
Salter, Professor at the School of Political Studies, University of Ottawa, 2006 (Mark B., “The Global
Visa Regime and the Political Technologies of the International Self: Borders, Bodies, Biopolitics,”
Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 31, Google Scholar, Accessed 7/9/18 GDI-GN

The visa is a necessary supplement to the passport system , which constitute one quarter of the global
mobility regime: frontier formalities, passports, visas, and les sans-papiers (the stateless and the refugee). James
Hollifield and Rey Koslowski have offered grim prognoses on the health of the global mobility regime,
when measured by the traditional standards of regime theory.30 However, if we use James N. Rosenau’s progressive
model of instantiation of global governance (ideas, behaviors, and institutions),31 the global mobility regime seems to be
more robust. I have argued elsewhere that there exists a broad consensus on the fundamental tenets of
the global mobility regime, despite the lack of specific legal treaties.32 There is a normative consensus
in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Every individual has a right to a nationality , to leave
their country, and to return to their country.33 There is also a broad behavioral consensus in relation to the documentary
regime.34 There are also functional institutions, such as the International Civil Aviation Organization and
International Air Transportation Agency, that set global standards for travel . Fundamental to this
regime is the lack of a significant right of entry , and the concomitant function of a state not only to
regulate its population not only entry into it. Barry Hindess has argued that the rights of citizenship, with its
attendant right of entry, can be viewed as a way of 174 The Global Visa Regime: Borders, Bodies, Biopolitics managing
international population.35 Nevzat Soguk’s discussion of the refugee regime as a management of that “surplus”
international population not encompassed by the nation-state norm is also central to this perspective.36
At its root, then, the international global mobility regime endows the citizen with a right to exit their
“home,” a right to return “home,” and a right to become a refugee, at which point other sovereigns
have an obligation to permit admission.

The affirmative is part and parcel of the biopolitical neoliberal project that seeks to
redefine what it means to be acceptable, and therefore, unacceptable
Sparke, Professor in the Politics Department at UC Santa Cruz, 2006 [M.B., ‘A Neoliberal Nexus:
Economy, Security and the Biopolitics of Citizenship on the Border’, Political Geography 25(2), pp. 151-
180 GDI – JM]

By securitized nationalism I am referring to the cultural-political forces that lead to the imagining,
surveilling and policing of the nation-state in especially exclusionary but economically discerning
ways. The increasingly market-mediated methods of such securitization often involve commercial risk
management and 'dataveillance' strategies, but with securitized nationalism they are combined with
longstanding nationalistic traditions of imagining the homeland, encoding bodies, and - in David
Campbell's (1998) terms - 'writing security' through identity-based exclusions of people deemed to be
untrustworthy aliens. By free market transnationalism, by contrast, I am referring to distinctively
incorporative economic imperatives that involve increasing transnational capitalist interdependencies
and the associated entrenchment of transnational capitalist mobility rights through various forms of free
market re-regulation. Such a regime of free market transnationalism may well be considered by many
readers to be a rough synonym for neoliberalism. But here I am proposing a more conjunctural
approach to theorising neoliberalism as a contextually contingent articulation of free market
governmental practices with varied and often quite illiberal forms of social and political rule (see also
Sparke, 2004a and Sparke, forthcoming). This context-contingent definition of neoliberalism should not
be taken to imply that it is a form of rule that is all-inclusive or simply continuous with the long history
and heterogeneity of capitalism itself. The 'neo' does mark something discrete and new historically,
including, not least of all, the transnationalism of today's liberalized market regimes. While
neoliberalism certainly represents a revival of classical 19th century free market liberalism, it is also
clearly a new kind of capitalist liberalization that is distinct insofar as it has been imagined and
implemented after and in opposition to the state-regulated national economies of the twentieth
century. It is because such imagination and implementation has been worked out in different ways in
different places that neoliberalism needs to be examined conjuncturally. The 'Neoliberal Nexus'
referred to in the title of this paper is therefore meant to indicate this conjunctural approach as well as
underlining how the Nexus program itself can be understood as an example of neoliberalization. A
conjunctural approach, it needs underlining, does not foreclose the possibility of making more general
claims about neoliberalism and its reterritorialization of social and political life. Thus while explaining
the emergence and significance of the Nexus program as a context contingent response to the
contradictory imperatives of national securitization and economic facilitation, the article still makes a
claim that the program exemplifies broader changes to citizenship - most notably, new transnational
mobility rights for some and new exclusions for others - under a combination of macroscale neoliberal
governance and microscale neoliberal governmentality. In order to clarify this argument, I begin by
explaining what I mean by neoliberal governance and governmentality and why border management
can be viewed as a useful window on to the neoliberal remaking of citizenship. Subsequently, I will
chart the contradictory story of the development of the NEXUS program and consider the ways in which
it exemplifies both the inclusions and exclusions of neoliberal citizenship.
 Rights
Laws and guarantees of rights don’t access liberation and freedom. Freedom must be
undertaken as a practice
Joxe, Director of Studies at Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, 2007
(Alain, Chapter 4, Space, Knowledge and Power: Foucault and Geography, eds. Stuart Elden, Professor of
Political Theory and Geography and Jeremy Crampton, Ph.D The Pennsylvania State University, 2007,
pg.s 9-10, EBSCO, Accessed 7/6/18 GDI-JV)
We would argue forcefully that Foucault’s politics is not one of defeatism: a claim that has been made before, but which bears
repeating. While liberation and freedom are both desirable and achievable, they will not come about
with the mere passing of certain laws or by the guarantee of rights. Rather, freedom is a practice or a
process that has to be constantly undertaken. This theme runs through both the collective work on
populations and the mode of their governing, and at the individual level in his later work on practices
of the self. To take a particularly ‘spatial’ example, when Paul Rabinow interviewed him for an architecture journal in 1982 Foucault
remarked: I do not think it possible to say that one thing [architectural project] is of the order of
‘liberation’ and another is of the order of ‘oppression.’ There are a certain number of things that one can say with some
certainly about a concentration camp to the effect that it is not an instrument of liberation, but one should still take into account – and this is
not generally acknowledged – that, aside, from torture and execution, which preclude any resistance, no matter
how terrifying a given system may be, there always remain the possibilities of resistance,
disobedience, and oppositional groupings … liberty is a practice. (Foucault 1984, 245 emphasis added) He then made
the point in more explicitly general terms: The liberty of men is never assured by the institutions and laws that are
intended to guarantee them. That is why almost all of these laws and institutions are quite capable of
being turned around … which is not to say that, after all, one may as well leave people in slums,
thinking that they can simply exercise their rights there. (Foucault 1984, 245–6)
 Open Borders
Open borders without citizenship is just economic exploitation with a happy face
Bauder, Professor, Dept. of Geography & Environmental Studies at Ryerson University, 2014 (Harald,
“The Possibilities of Open and No Borders,” Social Justice, Vol. 39, No. 4, N.D., JSTOR, Accessed 2/7/18
GDI-GN)

In this section, I
consider the "contingent" possibility of open borders under the assumption that the
territorial nation-state will continue to remain the dominant way of organizing political communities
and that formal citizenship will continue to define political belonging to this territorial nation-state. These
assumptions are not unreasonable. The political configuration of the territorial nation-state has developed
historically through the interconnection of authority, rights, and territory (Sassen 2006). For Stuart Elden (2010,
811), "territory can be understood as a political technology" that has been extremely effective in asserting order and
control, in particular because of its "calculability" (Elden 2005,2007) and the fusion of nation and state within a territorial container (Taylor
1994). This territorial nation-state is deeply entrenched in today's material practices and structures of
capitalism,3 and normalized as a rarely questioned political organizing principle (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002). Membership in
this territorial nation-state has been expressed as formal citizenship . Early political theorists like Jean-Jacques
Rousseau (1762,31) presupposed a political community on the basis of a territory sustaining the citizens "who
make the state." In this tradition, Hannah Arendt (1968, 81) famously declared decades ago: "Nobody can be a citizen of the world as he [sz'c] is
the citizen of his [s/c] country." Arendt thus affirmed that citizenship does not express a commitment to global
humanity (or belonging in a "cultural" or ethnic community) but rather a legal membership in a territorial nation-
state. Although the scholarly literature has observed the denationalization of a range of aspects of citizenship (including rights, political
activity, identity, and solidarity), in the context of legal status "citizenship is almost always conferred by the nation-state, and as a matter of
international law, it is nation-sate citizenship that is recognized and honored" (Bosniak 2000,456). Throughformal citizenship, the
territorial nation-state grants political, social, and economic rights to its citizens, provides free and equal
labor market access, redistributes social and economic resources, and promises protection against oppression. If
the territorial nation-state and formal citizenship constitute "outer" material conditions, then border controls and restricted
access to formal citizenship for those who cross the borders remain key mechanisms of inclusion and
exclusion. The open-borders scenario assumes obviously that people can cross borders freely; however,
access to citizenship may still be restrictive. In other words, open borders may permit free human mobility
but migrants can still be denied membership in the territorial nation-state. If migrants are not entitled to
citizenship, then the above-mentioned problems related to border controls would not be addressed
but would persist: migrants could be treated unequally, as in the case of temporary foreign residents, or even
criminalized, as in the case of non-status residents; they may not compete freely in the labor market; they could be exploited as
vulnerable labor if their economic rights are not protected like those of citizens ; and they would
maintain subject identities that exclude and oppress, as the examples of Turkish "foreigners" in Germany or Mexican
"illegals" in the United States illustrate (see Anderson et al. 2009; Nevins 2002; Piore 1979; Sharma 2006). Under the open-
borders scenario, exclusionary citizenship principles would reproduce inequality, unfreedom, social
injustice, and oppression.
Open borders intensify capital accumulation and exploitation by mobilizing all labor,
inability to solve global border regulations only shifts oppression and inequality, only
no borders can resolve current structures of belonging
Bauder, Professor, Dept. of Geography & Environmental Studies at Ryerson University, 2014 (Harald,
“The Possibilities of Open and No Borders,” Social Justice, Vol. 39, No. 4, N.D., JSTOR, Accessed 2/7/18
GDI-GN)
No Border as Real Possibility

Even where the geographical scales of political authority are changing, practices and structures of governance remain territorial in nature. A
practical example of an emerging scale of governance relates to the recent experiments of the European Union, the Eurozone, and the
Schengen Area. Granted, the right to free mobility and residence in any member state for European-Union
citizens is matched by domicile-like European citizenship that extends municipal voting rights, grants
local labor market access, and offers protection from discrimination based on nationality. Thus, in light
of the recent "Euro" crisis, Greek, Spanish, and Italian citizens have been able to respond to high
unemployment rates and the attack on their welfare systems by moving to Germany , where they
enjoy almost equal residency and labor market rights as Germans (Statistisches Bundesamt 2012). In addition, the identity of
non-belonging foreigner has largely disappeared from popular and political debate in reference to EU internal
migrants (Bauder 2011 a). Yet, simultaneously, the external borders of Europe have hardened , and only
privileged so-called third-country nationals are permitted entry into Europe ; if less privileged third-
country nationals manage to cross the border as temporary or irregular migrants, they possess no entitlement to
citizenship, are treated unequally, and experience unfreedom , citizenship based discrimination, and
exploitation. The abolition of border and migration controls within Europe has merely shifted the
problems of inequality, unfreedom, injustice, and oppression associated with bordering practices to a different scale.
An open-borders scenario would only be capable of addressing these problems if it were implemented on a
global scale. However, an open-borders world with territorial nation-states or other territorial political
configurations may not deliver on the promises of equality, freedom, justice, and liberty either —quite
the opposite: from a materialist position, neoliberal (and neoclassical) calls for open borders can be
interpreted as an ideological legitimation of the acceleration of capital accumulation (Gill 2009). In fact,
open borders under existing structures of statehood and global capitalism may fully unleash the
brutal forces of accumulation that have been constrained by border controls and migration restrictions. Open
borders may increase global labor competition and drive down wages by pitting migrant and non-
migrant workers against each other in a race to the bottom (Bauder 2006b). Furthermore, under the contemporary neoliberalist
regime, which has already weakened the social progams that redistribute resources and protect workers and citizens (Peck 2001), open
borders—es pecially in combination with domicile citizenship—would wreak havoc on the existing national welfare
systems by entitling migrants to access collec tive resources to which they have not contributed (Friedman n.d.). A
world under the conditions of contemporary capitalism without the constraints of border
management and exclusionary citizenship practices may be akin to a "neo-liberal Utopia " (Samers
2003,214) in which not only labor is freely mobile, but capital accumulation , labor exploitation, and the
demolition of welfare systems would also proceed in an accelerated fashion. In the words of Dan Hiebert (2003, 188-89),
"while migration restrictions are based on the protection of privilege, removing those restrictions would
not end privilege ... such an effort could just as easily lead to mass harm as mass good." In truly dialectical fashion, an open-
borders future that promises equality, freedom, justice, and liberty also harbors the potential of this
fu ture's negation. Defusing the danger of such a neoliberal Utopia requires the transformation of the
contemporary structures of capitalism and is therefore situated in the realm of the real possible. It
entails the transformation of the current structures not only of capitalism , but also of territorial
political organization and belonging. In this sense, the real possible related to free human mobility
corresponds to the call for "no border."
Specific Migrants
 Refugee and Asylum-Seekers
Undocumented migrants exist between legal protections, subject to exceptional
treatment through exclusion and violence that mimics the homo sacer
Whitley, Doctoral Student, 2015 (Leila Marie, “More than a Line: Borders as Embodied Sites,”
Goldsmiths, University of London, N.D.,
https://research.gold.ac.uk/12314/1/CUL_thesis_WhitleyL_2015.pdf, Accessed 7/9/18 GDI-GN)

Work that applies Agamben's theory to the social condition of so-called irregular migrants tend to focus on the
relationship between undocumented migrants and the law – and particularly, the status of being legally
dispossessed from the country in which one resides (Darling, 2009; Rajaram and Grundy-War, 2004, Schinkel, 2009; Willen,
2010). This body of work is specifically interested in irregular migrants – those who are seeking refugee status or
who enter or reside in a country without legal permission to be present. By focusing on this state of
migrants (because illegality is a state or condition, not an identity), even if the relation to law is not what is put under
discussion in the work, a particular relationship to law is pre-selected : all are in the condition of legal
exclusion, and it is the effects of this legal exclusion that are addressed through reference to Agamben’s work. An early and often-
cited use of Agamben’s theory to study the detention of irregular migrants is Prem Kumar Rajaram and Carl
Grundy-War’s article “The Irregular Migrant as Homo Sacer: Migration and Detention in Australia, Malaysia and Thailand” (2004).
Rajaram and Grundy-War argue specifically that refugees are constructed as Agamben’s homo sacer
when the refugee is placed outside of the law . Being positioned outside of the law can lead to the
refugee being subjected to treatment on the part of the state that would be unacceptable for citizens,
and to there being little to no access to legal protection or recourse. They write, “Levels of innuendo and
violence unthinkable to regular human beings, citizens, are regularly perpetrated against the refugee
or asylum seeker.20 The refugee as homo sacer describes the condition of exclusion that those
exempt from the normal sovereignty are subject to” (p.41). What they emphasize in their application of the
theory of the homo sacer, then, is the exclusion of the migrant from the protections afforded by citizenship
through a legal exclusion and the exposure to violence that follows from this exclusion. In addition to
the problems implicit in this argument which first misplaces bare life as a depoliticized position and
then equates citizens with regular human beings, it is not always clear whom the authors have in mind
when they write about the migrant as homo sacer. In fact, the use of the term “irregular migrant” in the title and text of
the paper is slightly misleading. As the paper progresses, the term “refugees” increasingly replaces “irregular migrants,” with the two terms
even sometimes appearing with an “or” linking them together (p.41), causing a considerable degree of confusion between the two groups
within the paper. They write, at various stages of the paper, that the person they have in mind is the migrant who
attempts to enter a country without legal permission via clandestine boat journey; those subjected to
forcible transport and detention and refugees who can be found in aid camps and have no access to legal
support. It is not clear whether a person would have to satisfy all three of these criteria (clandestine journey, detention or forced transport,
and residence in a refugee aid camp) to be considered homo sacer, or whether any one would do.

Asylum discourse is a product of biopolitical epistemology that reifies the divide

between the civil and the foreign
Estevez, Center for Research on North America, 2014 (Ariadna, “The Politics of Death and Asylum
Discourse: Constituting Migration Biopolitics from the Periphery,” Sagepub , 2017,
https://search.proquest.com/docview/1655594988/367279E9EC4D4E8APQ/19?accountid=1557/,
accessed 7/7/18, GDI- John Melton)
In the writings of Foucault, a dispositif or apparatus is a set of social relationships built around a discourse: institutions, laws, policies, disciplines, scientific, and philosophical statements,

As a tactic in the migration apparatus, asylum discourse has truth effects; it establishes
concepts, moral propositions, and so on.

subjectivities, objects, and concepts that separate the false from the true . In order to create these truth effects, it relies on
other truth discourses such as the law and criminology, and it is produced and distributed under the control of large political and economic apparatuses such as courts, immigration offices, and

law firms. This migration apparatus serves American biopoli- tics; it is a ‘‘defense’’ against the ‘‘threat’’ of
Mexican migration. Asylum law should not, however, form part of this biopower since it pertains to complementary sovereign and
disciplinary powers: while the first results in legal codes, the second implements these codes institutionally. However, asylum law in the United States is

used to regulate migration, in this case, the migration of Mexicans, and not to discipline them. This is
because, as Foucault argued, there is a strategic use of law in biopolitics due to the development of biopower, and

norms become more important than the judicial system. This does not mean that law or its institutions tend to disappear but that the law
increasingly serves as a norm—intended to impose conformism and homogenize—and that judicial institutions are more integrated into a continuum of apparatuses with regulatory

functions.31It is a regulatory mechanism in the politics of life and death. Asylum discourse in the United States— through its
legal texts—serves as a tactic for the regulation of migration, which in turn has economic and political

objectives: to defend American territory from the threat of Mexican migration and maintain the
credibility of security cooperation between Mexico and the United States. Asylum is codified in various legal texts: the United
Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (1951), its Protocol (1967), and the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). Asylum dis- course in the migration apparatus of the
United States excludes a subject a priori if they have parti- cipated in the persecution of others in connection with one or more of the five protected grounds, stayed in the United States for
over a year at the time of the application, or resettled successfully in another country. Once a person is eligible for asylum, their claim will be successful if they man- age to prove, in terms of
the politics of truth in asylum discourse established in INA 101(a; 42) that they have a well-founded fear of persecution due to the government’s unwillingness or inability to protect victims

from their persecutors and that this persecution is motivated by the victim’s race, nationality, religion, political opinion, or membership of a particular social group. These two con-
cepts—the government’s unwillingness or inability to protect and motivation—establish the terms of inclusion and exclusion in the politics of truth of asylum law. As
indicated previously, asylum law forms part of the US migration apparatus. As such, it is enforced managerially , although its reproduction, signification, and

power techniques resemble those of sovereign power, such as courts . There are two institutional techniques that overtly bring
asylum law into the migration apparatus. First, the division of asylum into affirmative and defensive procedures permits the differential treatment of claimants according to their
socioeconomic status and gender, which supposedly deter- mines their criminal proclivity. Affirmative applicants either enter the country with a valid visa or overstay their visas and therefore
hold no documents authorizing them to remain in the country. Their claims are reviewed by an asylum officer from the USCIS and if not approved they are referred to an immigration judge of
the EOIR, which is a branch of the US Department of Justice but fails to operate as a proper court. Only at this time is the applicant transferred to removal proceedings, although their
application has not yet been rejected. In defensive claims, a migration officer places the applicant in removal proceedings and the case goes directly to the EOIR. Typically, claimants who go
directly to defensive asylum do not hold a visa and state their intention to seek asylum at a port of entry before an immigration officer. In these situations, asylum seekers are sent to detention
centers where they are held until an immigration court makes a decision, which could take up to five years. While awaiting a decision, the judge either grants or denies asylum and proceeds to
removal.32 Crystal Massey, then a human rights advocate and researcher at the Law Firm of Carlos Spector and today Associate Attorney at the Southwest Asylum & Migration Institute, claims
the purpose of the affirmative/defensive distinction is to act as a filter for the type of Mexicans allowed access to the asylum system—which does not mean they are granted asylum, just
access to the system. Massey argues that people holding a visa are usually middle-class, well-informed Mexicans who have the means or knowledge to obtain a border crossing document or
know that stating an interest in asylum at the border will lead to their detention. Massey also claims young men spend more time in deten- tion since they are associated with the drug
business or gangs in the biased minds of American civil servants or judges. In detention, people are forced to live in degrading and uncomfortable conditions for long periods and harassed
(separated from young children and told they could be separated for a very long time) to pressure them to drop their asylum claim. Applicants in detention can request a ‘‘credible fear’’
interview in which they must provide evi- dence that their fear of persecution is well founded.33 The success of a claimant’s credible fear inter- view depends entirely on the judge’s
perception. This prerogative is granted by the 1996 Real ID Act which, says Cabot, gives judges the ‘‘negative credibility decision with which they can decide that asylum seekers are not
credible based on any inconsistencies in the story, even inconsistencies that have no bearing on the actual claim of asylum (the color of a house, the time of day that something happened, etc).
This kind of subjective assumption is sufficient for a judge to justify dismissing asy- lum seekers’ testimony.’’ According to Massey, together, the division between negative and positive

American migration courts are

procedures is intended to exclude the poor and young men suspected of being carriers of violence. Second,

administrative, managerial bodies that administrate migra- tion rather than disciplinary bodies
responsible for controlling sovereign power. The quasi-legal or quasi-administrative character of
migration courts makes decision making subjective and arbitrary. Immigration courts in the United States are not constitutional like
civil or criminal courts where people can claim rights. Their decisions are appealed with the Board of Immigration Appeals, whose pub- lished decisions are law only for the circuit where the

. Although these
claim was based. Only when the asylum seeker appeals a judge’s decision in the Supreme Court does their case enter a constitutional field

administrative bodies look like courts, law enforcement is relaxed and discretionary . Although extralegal techniques
are key to defining the managerial status of asylum law, legal texts play a fundamental role in the regulation of Mexican migration because the Endriago subject dislocates concepts used to
establish the politics of truth in such discourse. This subversion further narrows the terms of inclusion of the two core concepts in the legal construction of the refugee: unwillingness or
inability to protect citizens from persecution and motivation based on one of the five protected categories. Asylum law has truth effects concerning what constitutes an act and a vic- tim of

It has created a politics of truth— subjectivities, objects, and concepts

persecution, and the context in which persecution occurs.

that separate true from false—in which the definition of state attribution, responsibility, context, and
victim excludes many subjectivities, objects, and concepts resulting from necropolitics and the
necropractices of the Endriago subject. The hybrid character of the governmentalization of the Mexican state and its necropolitics therefore subvert the
politics of truth in asylum discourse. Ernesto Laclau’s concept of dislocation is helpful in understanding this subversion. Dislocation refers to social processes or events that cannot be
represented or symbolized within a particular sys- tem of identities and consequently lead to a disruption of the structure itself.34 Or as Francisco Panizza explains, ‘‘Dislocation is caused by
events beyond the control of the hegemonic forces that cannot be symbolized by the existing discursive order and therefore cannot be integrated within its political, cultural and institutional
boundaries.’’35 Through the actions of the Endriago subject necropolitics dislocates classic understandings of the subject and object of persecution in the judicial discourse of asylum.
Surveillance reflects the transformation of sovereignty, borders, and territory in a
digital age. Rejecting the flow of refugees erects a symbolic border around the state of
sovereignty.
Jones et al., professor in the Department of Geography at UH Mānoa, 2017 (Reece,
Corey Johnson, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Gabriel Popescu, Indiana University South
Bend, Alison Mountz, Balsillie School of International Affairs, Wilfrid Laurier University, “Interventions on
the state of sovereignty at the border,” Political Geography, pg.s 5, July, 2017, Research Gate, Accessed
7/10/18, GDI-JV)

Edward Snowden's revelations about the US National Security Agency (NSA) global surveillance practices presents
another significant opportunity to reflect on the reshaping of sovereignty, borders, and territory in the
digital age (Bauman et al., 2014). The NSA has embedded the US borders in a global surveillance flow with
the purported goal of keeping the US national territory secure. At work here is a quintessential topological
strategy that justifies its purpose in terms of protecting territorial sovereignty , while at the same time
undermining the sovereignty of other nation-states . The geographies of NSA surveillance, as they
involve a transnational web of security agencies, public authorities, and private corporations, do not
sit nicely within a Euclidean territorial template. The refugee flow from war-torn countries including
Syria and Afghanistan traveling from Turkey to Germany is a remarkable example of topologies from
below. In their journey across national territories, refugees have relied to an unprecedented degree on digital technologies such as GPS and
social media in order to successfully navigate a maze of European borders. The knee-jerk reaction from government entities
opposing refugees' movements has been to erect symbolic border fences around their territories.
However, there is more to the relationship between state sovereignty and refugee flows than the
encounter between the fence and the digital phone. European territorial borders are already embedded in all kinds of
flows, having been moved online through the digitization of personal records and massive database storage. Many refugees’ desire to reach
Germany without registering in other countries was rooted in the concern that if their bodily data was entered into immigration databases,
according to existing EU regulations at the time, they would be required to settle in these places and would be prevented from entering
Germany. Thegeography of refugee flows is one of nodes and connections, and realtime, remotely
coordinated directional shifts, attesting to the fact that digitization and the production of space work
hand in hand today. Political geographers need to develop adequate analytical tools to appropriately
investigate the nature of these transformations .

The refugee exists in a transnational space where humanity itself becomes a political
category subject to biopolitical manipulation
Caldwell 4 [Anne, Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of
Louisville, Theory & Event, 7.2]

This transformation suggests the real novelty of the French Declaration is not its definition of
citizenship. What is novel is the new category of a "man" at once citizen and member of universal
humanity -- without fully being either. Life in and of itself, is for the first time offered up as a political
category. That recognition is not without precedent. Some sense of world citizenship, rather than local
belonging, was evoked by the Stoics. The middle ages recognized a "jus gentium" or law of nations.
Those laws offered guidance for the treatment of one nation by another, without focusing on either the
rights of individuals as members of humanity, or on the rights of humanity as a universal group
exceeding different classifications of peoples. The French Declaration, despite its flaws, is among the
first official formulations granting the natural life scorned by the ancients a value purely for its own sake.
As Agamben teaches us, wherever natural life and political appear, so too will appear the figure linking
them: homo sacer. The complex mixture of these categories were not particularly visible so long as life
was wholly defined by nation-state belonging. The refugee, however, indicates contemporary political
belonging, and the power regulating it, can no longer be coded by domestic categories alone. Nor can
the distinctions between natural and political life be limited to the field of the nation-state. The
refugee is the most explicit indication of this impossibility. The refugee exists in a transnational space
made of an awkward separation and mixture of domestic life and international life. By definition, the
refugee cannot appeal to its own state, or to national citizenship, for protection. The refugee must
therefore appeal to some other power to recognize it not as a national citizen, but as a figure of an
international life or human belonging meriting protection solely on that basis. A power that offers such
protection can no longer be adequately classified under the heading of nation-state sovereignty.

Refugees pose a unique threat to the fiction of the sovereign, exposing the distinction
between birth and belonging; prompts violence from the state to eliminate migrant
bodies
Whitley, Doctoral Student, 2015 (Leila Marie, “More than a Line: Borders as Embodied Sites,”
Goldsmiths, University of London, N.D.,
https://research.gold.ac.uk/12314/1/CUL_thesis_WhitleyL_2015.pdf, Accessed 7/9/18 GDI-GN)

Agamben suggests in his work that there is a link between bare life and refugees in particular . The link to
the refugee that he identifies does not, however, rest on an argument that the refugee is excluded from
the nation. Instead, while he writes that the refugee is a contemporary example of a position that “is
exclusively considered as sacred life,” his thinking in this instance draws on Arendt (Agamben, 1998, p.133). Arendt locates
refugees as those who were excluded from the nation-state system, and so rendered stateless in a
world of nation-states, in the moment when the state was perverted to an instrument of nationalism (Arendt,
1973, p.231). This perversion transformed the state from a guarantor of the rights of all into the protector
of only “nationals.” Arendt recognizes this as a tragedy, and for her the conquest of state by nation means that the condition of
statelessness was inevitably produced alongside the nation-state (1973, p.230). The refugee is important for Agamben due to
his biopolitical understanding of democracy and modern politics . Since for Agamben the decisive
moment of modernity is the moment when zoē enters into the sphere of the polis , it is the biological
body bound to the external control of state order that is the foundation of modern democracy. According to Agamben, this
biopolitics is evident in the founding documents of modern democracy, including the writ of habeas
corpus, which importantly does not require a subject or a citizen to appear in court, but only 101 the physical
presence of a body. The body's centrality to politics is further enshrined in the 1789 Declaration of the rights of men and of citizens, in
which it is the fact of life, or natural birth, which entitles man to rights. According to Agamben, in this move natural life becomes the bearer of
sovereignty, and the equality declared to exist between all men is in fact the equality of death. In Agamben’s own words, it
is “precisely
the body's capacity to be killed” which makes equality possible (Agamben, 1998, p.125). As an effect of this,
birth becomes the immediate bearer of sovereignty. In this way, nativity and sovereignty are bound
together in democracy. Their welding forms the basis of the nation-state. Agamben insists that it is impossible to
understand the modern state without attending to the ways that it is natural life, and specifically the fact of birth, that is invested with
sovereignty as the governing structure moves from subjects to citizens (monarchy to democracy). The refugee is an important figure for
Agamben because refugees
break the continuity assumed by the nation-state to exist between the human
and the citizen – between nativity and nationality. In breaking this continuity, refugees “put the originary
fiction of modern sovereignty in crisis. Bringing to light the difference between birth and nation, the
refugee causes the secret presumption of the political domain – bare life – to appear for an instant
within that domain” (Agamben, 1998, p.131). The originary fiction to which Agamben refers is the assumption that the human and the
citizen are one and the same, and that nativity and nationality are similarly unitary. As he puts it, the fiction is that “birth
immediately becomes nation” (1998, p.128, emphasis in original). In this way, the refugee makes visible a critical
juncture of modern politics for Agamben: namely the link between birth and belonging in the nation-state
(whether it be in the form of jus soli or jus sanguinis) precisely because the refugee embodies the space that is not recognized by this
formula.21

The process of naturalizing refugees is biopolitical by overdetermining the location

where refugees are allowed to stay, constructing an invisible border between the
migrant and the civil
Anssi Paasi, Academy of Finland, 1-1-2012, "Border Studies Reanimated: Going beyond the
Territorial/Relational Divide," Environment and Planning A, Volume 44
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1068/a45282 - GDI John Melton

The power of such bordering practices—which can be labelled as discursive/emotional landscapes of

social power (Paasi, 2012b)—is related to the fact that only 3% of the world’s population resides in a
state other than the one in which they were born (Cunningham, 2004). This implies two things. Firstly, as
Hirst and Thompson (1996) have reminded us, despite global flows, the bulk of the world’s population
is still “trapped by the lottery of their birth”. Secondly, border-crossings by immigrants and refugees,
totalling some 190 million people, have concentrated unevenly in states: 75% of immigrants live in just
twenty-eight states (Shah, 2008). Developed countries, hosting one third of immigrants, have reacted
to this phenomenon in the spirit of neoliberalism by preferring progressively a strategic ‘selectivity’:
that is, often prioritizing the ‘best’ and the ‘brightest’ (Hyndman, 2012). Immigration has been
opposed (and attained privileges defended) in many states on cultural, ethnic, demographic, and
economic grounds, but environmental arguments are increasingly utilized as well (the ‘greening of
anti-immigration’). The phenomenon is not just a case of populist parties riding into power on themes
leaning on often selective reading of immigration statistics, as migration is to an increasing degree also
being represented as a security question that draws on the purported risks of terrorism (Huysmans,
2006). As Hyndman (2012) reminds us, the securitization of migration is a defining feature of current
geopolitics. This closely resonates with biopolitics, the management of populations, and thus
accentuates borders. Hyndman suggests that attention is increasingly paid to border-crossers, not
merely borders or acts of border-crossings. These simple but often neglected facts provide one way to
understand the power of ‘bounded spaces’ as stubborn resources co-opted for political exploitation of
ideas rooted ostensibly in homogeneous territorial spaces and exclusive national narratives of
belonging and identity—all of which are continually reproduced in the processes of spatial
socialization (Jones and Merriman, 2012; Paasi, 1996). This occurs despite the fact that, in the spirit of
neoliberal agendas, the ideas of citizenship, and the rights and obligations of national citizens, are
changing away from a ‘collective’ ideal towards that of a more ‘individualistic’, mobile, and skills-
based one (Soysal, 2012; Mitchell, 2003). This highly contextual, ‘soft’ side of bordering is crucially
related to cultural aspects and to the symbolic violence practised in media and education. However, it
is still largely an uncharted terrain in political geography. While previous ‘landscapes’ are critical in
inculcating national identity narratives and in mobilizing the imagined national communities among
citizens, today they are commonly fused with practices related to control and surveillance: borders,
border-crossings, and border- crossers are monitored by increasingly technical devices and practices.
These technical landscapes of control are crucial in the post-9/11 world and are related not to ‘people’
but to population and circulation: that is, biopolitics (cf Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero, 2008). Similar to the
discursive landscapes of social power, the practices and technologies associated with the increasing
bordering and control of mobilities are not located solely in border areas but stretch beyond the
borders proper. At airports seductive signs encourage vigilance by proposing that ‘security is everyone’s
business, please make it yours’. Passports, irises, and fingerprints are new synonyms of borders.
Amoore’s (2006) concept of the ‘biometric border’ indicates a dual move in bordering: a turn to
scientific and managerial techniques in governing the mobilities of bodies and the extension of
biopower so that the body, in a way, becomes the carrier of the border and “it is inscribed with
multiple encoded boundaries of access”. This complexity doubtless strengthens ‘bordering’ in a
society, and may be constitutive of social, cultural, and political distinctions between social groups.
While borders are often increasingly concrete barriers (Rosière and Jones, 2012), the securitization of
’bounded’ state spaces occurs ever more in global space through border- crossings: in the name of
security, border control and management stretch across borders. This is particularly prominent in the
case of some powerful states. The mission of the US Customs and Border Protection, for example,
states that “We safeguard the American homeland at and beyond our borders.” The UK Border Agency,
for its part, presents itself as a global organization with 25 000 staff—including more than 9000
warranted officers— operating in “local communities, at our borders and across 135 countries
worldwide” (Paasi, 2012b). Bordering practices thus become increasingly mobile, networked,
technical, private, and detached from what were formerly regarded as state ‘borders’.
Simultaneously, US-based and Western European companies are insurmountably dominating the
global sale of the arms that states use to ‘secure’ their territory (SIPRI, 2011). These two ‘landscapes’
open the idea of border into a set of bordering practices that are historically contingent. These more
or less mobile landscapes eventually gravitate towards the same path and may strengthen states as
imagined bounded units, however porous they are in practice (Paasi, 2012b). They display how
borders can be exploited to both mobilize and fix territory, security, identities, emotions and
memories, and various forms of national socialization. Further, this conceptualization of borders
suggests that, while it is continually vital to examine how borders and bordering practices come about, it
is also critical to reflect on the political rationalities and state-based ideologies embedded in these
practices. The management and control of flows, (national) ideologies and socialization demand
careful reflection on the functions of states in bordering practices (cf Johnson et al, 2011).
 Trafficking Victims
Border control reform for human trafficking delimits and controls the ways in which
biopolitical techniques violently produce and manage flows of human migration.
Berman 2010 [Jacqueline, “Biopolitical Management, Economic Calculations and ‘Trafficked
Women’”, International Migration 48.4]

Biopower spreads out in a vast web of intersecting techniques and technologies that contain, manage,
and direct human life. As a technology of state security, surveying bodies as they cross borders,
migration management reveals the operation of biopolitics. Biopolitics does not displace, but
operates in proximity to, traditional, coercive power, as suggested by responses to trafficking that
sustain the coercion, incarceration, and Biopolitics and trafficked women 103 2010 The Author Journal
Compilation 2010 IOM deportation of trafficked persons. As mentioned above, for example, the IOM
Agenda recommends that states link immigration to intelligence and security operations, digitize visa
databases and biometric identities, and provide technologies that can ensure the inanimacy of objects
and mark all bodies on the move with a state-generated, easily-traceable, digitized form of
recognition (IOM, 2003: 64-69). These practices, simultaneously located at the site of the border and
the body, seek to control both and thus put the population (narratively gendered and racialized as
trafficked women) in the service of the state. From the spectacle of their deportation to the localized
fruits of their labour, they help to support the life of the state and of the globalized economic system.
They also serve as a site for the fetishistic display of technology driven by fears about global capital,
international security, and threatening bodies on the move. Captured at or through the border,
trafficked persons deemed as illegals, un-useful to the state, are brought into being biometrically so
value might be extracted from then before they then disappear from their destinations. In this light,
migration management quickly ceases to be about facilitating mobility or assisting and protecting
migrants. Migration becomes a contested site at which state control can be performed over borders
and bodies in the service of the demands of global security and capital. All of these practices may
indeed help states manage migration, but they equally reflect an exertion of biopolitical control over
bare life, an exertion that contradicts the desire to assist trafficked women and other people on the
move. Because migration management involves the surveillance, discipline, and control of
populations through the marking of individual bodies, these practices constitute acts of biopolitical
management. As such, they problematize any claim made by migration management’s proponents at
its inception that it is a means by which states can assist and protect migrants. Migration
management is as reliant upon the sensationalism and provocation of the narrative surrounding
human trafficking as the global news corporations that seek to increase advertising revenues with the
narrative’s prurient images. The narrative of trafficking allows migration management to be seen as
benevolent, progressive, understanding of migration projects, and a helpful alternative for trafficked
women. As biopolitics, however, it acts to delimit and control – in new ways with new technologies –
women’s bodies and trafficked populations in the service of global imbalances that survey and select
the sites and conditions of the useful and the not.
Impacts
 No Value to Life
No value to life in a biopolitical framework—everyone is exposed to the possibility of
being reduced to bare (read: valueless) life in the name of instrumentality
Agamben 1998 [Giorgio, professor of philosophy at university of Verona, Homo Sacer: Sovereign
Power and Bare Life, pg. 139-140]

It is not our intention here to take a position on the difficult ethical problem of euthanasia, which still
today, in certain countries, occupies a substantial position in medical debates and provokes
disagreement. Nor are we concerned with the radicaliry with which Binding declares himself in favor of
the general admissibility of euthanasia. More interesting for our inquiry is the fact that the sovereignty
of the living man over his own life has its immediate counterpart in the determination of a threshold
beyond which life ceases to have any juridical value and can, therefore, be killed without the
commission of a homicide. The new juridical category of “life devoid of value” (or “life unworthy of
being lived”) corresponds exactly—even if in an apparently different direction—to the bare life of homo
sacer and can easily be extended beyond the limits imagined by Binding. It is as if every valorization
and every “politicization” of life (which, after all, is implicit in the sovereignty of the individual over his
own existence) necessarily implies a new decision concerning the threshold beyond which life ceases
to be politically relevant, becomes only “sacred life,” and can as such be eliminated without
punishment. Every society sets this limit; every society—even the most modern—decides who its
“sacred men” will be. It is even possible that this limit, on which the politicization and the exceprio of
natural life in the juridical order of the state depends, has done nothing but extend itself in the history
of the West and has now— in the new biopolitical horizon of states with national sovereignty—moved
inside every human life and every citizen. Bare life is no longer confined to a particular place or a
definite category. It now dwells in the biological body of every living being.

Biopolitics renders its victims politically dead

Fowler, Ph.D, Instructor at Washington State University, 2016 (Rebecca, “U.S. biopolitical Geographies
of the Migrant,” borderlands e-journal 15(1), GDI-JM)

U.S. anti-immigrant policies and border technologies of exterior and interior enforcement constitute a
deathly biopolitical project in the state’s manipulation of space and place to exploit, contain, expel,
and/or destroy undocumented immigrants, ultimately rendering them invisible and as fodder for the
global corporate capital machine. Migrants are made to disappear in myriad ways. Before ever leaving
home, future immigrants are rendered invisible in their own countries, denied a platform for voicing
their political views. For example, in Mexico, the government continues to turn a blind eye to demands
made by farmers, teachers, and other workers that NAFTA be renegotiated, despite numerous
demonstrations over the last decade or more that have resulted in the closure of bridges and highways
and the taking over of government offices (Faux 2003). Once in the United States or other ‘receiving’
countries, the undocumented are perpetually banished to sites of containment situated outside the
normal juridico-political order. Consequent to the implementation of mobile border technologies of
interior enforcement that have resulted in the devastation of thousands of immigrant families,
migrants are made accomplice to their own exploitation through a ‘passive invisibility’ that manifests
itself in the failure to make demands on employers or to press for their rights from the state (Wicker
2010, p. 232). In what Hans-Rudolf Wicker terms ‘active invisibility’, the undocumented works diligently
to render him or herself invisible from public view so to fly under the radar of immigration authorities
and local police. Migrants may devise a number of evasion strategies including the decision not to drive
cars or use public transport, the correct use of pedestrian crossings, limiting circles of friends to a few
trustworthy individuals, not renting apartments under their own names, and not having bank accounts,
and resorting to informal channels in dealing with money, in particular sending remittances back home
exclusively through friends and work colleagues.

Borders shape identity—not simply through thinking alone but also through the literal
cleaving of bodies and tongues. This violently ruptures one’s heritage from the US
culture and writes the border into the being of border-crossers.
Whitley, Doctoral Student, 2015 (Leila Marie, “More than a Line: Borders as Embodied Sites,”
Goldsmiths, University of London, N.D.,
https://research.gold.ac.uk/12314/1/CUL_thesis_WhitleyL_2015.pdf, Accessed 7/9/18 GDI-GN)

The second way of thinking beyond the US-Mexico border as a line is found in the work of Gloria
Anzaldúa.4 Her book of poetry and pose, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), an important text in
Chicana feminism, challenges the border as a simple divide . For Anzaldúa, “the US-Mexican border es una
herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds ” (p.3). This observation, in
describing the border as an open wound and as a site of injury and division, points at the US-Mexico
border as something that is constructed. In other words, the border is something that is done by human
intervention that causes damage as it cleaves spaces – and people – apart . The imagery of wounding also alludes
to the body. As the poem this line appears within continues, what is divided by the border moves from being the land
and the physical space of the continent to Anzaldúa’s own body . She writes of the divide as a “1,950 mile-long open
wound/ dividing a pueblo, a culture,/ running down the length of my body,/ staking rods in my flesh,/ splits me splits me/ me raja me raja.” The
repetition of the phrase “splits me,” first in English and then in Spanish signals the irreconcilable doubling performed by the border as it rips
single subjects into halves. Inher description of the border as something that violates her body, Anzaldúa
points to the importance of the body in the divisions performed by the border, as well as the violence
of this constructed operation of distinction. In her work, the US-Mexico border not only runs through
geographical space and across land, but is enacted upon bodies and has effects for these bodies. It
marks and inscribes bodies as an act of differentiation carried out amongst people. The book is written
simultaneously in English and Spanish, and while sometimes the languages repeat the same idea, often there is no translation offered. This
means that the reader must be fluent in both languages to fully engage with the book. It has the effect
of both capturing and affirming a Chicana experience in which neither standard English nor standard
Spanish alone is adequate. Linguistics and their bordering effects matter to Anzaldúa. In a chapter entitled
“How to Tame a Wild Tongue” she writes of being taught to speak English without a Mexican accent - “Qué vale toda tu education si todavía
hablas inglés con un ‘accent,” she writes in her mother’s voice (1987, p.54); of being taught to be silent as a young girl –“Muchachitas bien
criadas, well-bred girls don’t answer back (1987, p.54); and of the first time she heard the word “nosotras,” a feminine version of the word
“we”- “I had not known the word existed. Chicanos use nosotros whether we’re male or female” (1987, p.54). Writing
in her Chicana
tongue, neither English nor Spanish alone, becomes a way to reclaim a language that is her own, but
that is treated as inferior. This is another example of the borderlands living of which Anzaldúa writes .
As I mentioned above, for Anzaldúa this placement at the borderlands has to do with who she is, and not where she is.
She writes “Nosostros los Chicanos straddle the borderlands” (1987, p.62). This straddling is about existing between two
spaces that are falsely divided from one another: it is an experience of the border that cannot be left
behind.
 Structural Violence
The militarization of the border attests to the structural violence inherent in the
maintenance of the nation-state community at the site of borderlands.
Gilberto Rosas, Associate Professor of Political Science, Washington University in St Louis, 2007,
“Fragile Ends of War,” Social Text 25 (2 (91)): 81-102. GDI John Melton

The undermining of the sovereign right to regulate boundaries and the daily challenges and
negotiations by immigrants and the people of the border region of the United States and Mexico
expose the rickety scaffold- ings of the state and gesture to its often violent refounding. I have
mapped some of the broad contours of the decidedly capitalist biopolitical and nec- ropolitical
technologies exercised in the borderlands, as well as the disci- plining and subjugation of those
appearing as foreign in Nogales, Sonora, and Nogales, Arizona. The ongoing militarized policing in the
border- lands, as moments in my ethnography show, resonates with Foucault’s suggestion that public
spectacles of state violence coalesce sovereignty and underscore the force relations behind
institutions such as the law. They also resonate with the commingling of law, sovereignty, and violence
in Agamben’s formulation. Moreover, the channeling of immigrants into the killing deserts or the
transnational sewer system exemplifies a merciless logic of disposability. These are the forces that
configured Beto’s singular The Fragile Ends of War 97 Over the longue durée, the ends of war on the
border appear death and those of some 4,000 other immigrants in the killing deserts of territory that
once belonged to Mexico, deaths that resonate with the forging of sovereignty through death and
violence in both Foucault’s and Agamben’s respective explications of sovereignty. Nevertheless,
Agamben’s positing of a relationship among policing, sovereignty, and the formation of new
consciousness remains too removed from the legacy of empire in suggesting that the abject figure of
violence to marshal the is rooted in the genealogy of the Western legal system. Moreover, it elides
Foucault’s analysis of the ongoing struggles below and at the fringes of technologies over life and
death to inaugurate bodies flowing across borders to the sovereignty
 Exceptional Violence
Exception is the law of pure violence without logos: it declares itself as the decider of
which violences are and are not legitimate.
Doxdater 2008 [Eric, “The [Rhetorical] Question of Exception, For Now,” in Communication and
Critical/Cultural Studies 5.2]

‘‘Will Americans Understand What It Means to Live in a State of Emergency?’’ On the day after the
day, this perceptive question was asked of me by a friend who struggled against the emergency in South
Africa that ran between 1985 and 1990. The answer could only be, ‘‘By and large, no.’’ And, little has
changed. In ‘‘relatively traditionless America,’’ as Hannah Arendt once put it, the promise of a return
to progress has done well to obscure the ‘‘grey zone’’ that forms when a sovereign(’s) rule of law
strives to sanctify and negate the normative power of its own precedent.11 A reflection of his concern
for the nature and cost of this hypocrisy, Agamben’s letter is more than a rehearsal of Foucault’s thesis
on biopolitics. Expressing a preference not to participate in ‘‘efforts to convince us to accept as normal
and humane those means of control which have always been considered exceptional and properly
inhumane,’’ the letter offers an important clue about the operativity of the exception, that which is
both ‘‘an anomic space in which what is at stake is a force of law without law’’ and a mythic violence
‘‘by means of which law seeks to annex anomie itself.’’12 Paradoxically, one is never fully in a state of
exception. An unformulatable manifestation of sovereignty’s structure, the declaration of exception is
also an event that dissolves and then appropriates the question of the political itself; when everything
and everyone is deemed suspect, the task of deciding the humanity of living man is converted into a
spiraling causality of fate, a form of life that is guilty as such.13 If Agamben’s philosophical claim about
the paradigm of the camps confounded the New York Times’ politically correct editorial desk, the
exception’s unraveling of citizenship into bare life can also be understood in terms of what Arendt called
‘‘general subjectivity,’’ a law of ‘‘pure violence without logos’’ and a logos that obscures the power*the
word and deed in concert*which appears before and constitutes the law.14

The biopolitics of immigration generates normative value by grounding itself on a

vision of absolute enclosure; this means the dark biopolitical underside of the
affirmative is the life they deem not worth living because it falls outside legitimate
channels of immigration. [1nc shell]
Ajana 2006 [Btihaj, “Immigration Interrupted,” Journal for Cultural Research, 10.3]
Before extending my analysis any further, I would like, at this point, to return to Nancy’s argument
regarding absolute enclosure in order to discuss the impossibility of absolute immanence and as such
the non-viability of immigration control. According to Nancy (1991, p. 4) ‘The logic of the absolute
violates the absolute’. This statement alludes to the dialectical logic by which Nancy seeks to explain
how individualism, that is, the absolute separation from the outside, is not only impossible, but also,
self-contradictory. Self-contradictory inasmuch as for a separation to be ‘absolute’, it has to eradicate
any contact with the outside by not only closing around what it has to enclose (e.g. spatial particularity
– territory – which is yet exposed at its borders to another territory) but also, by closing around itself:
‘The absolute must be the absolute of its own absoluteness, or not be at all… to be absolutely alone, it
is not enough that I be so; I must also be alone being alone’ (Nancy 1991, p. 4). But this double move
of closure, according to Nancy, is self-contradictory. For when a closure closes around itself, it
becomes that which is closed rather than the closure as such. The absurdity of this will to
absoluteness may be illustrated here if we imagine how in order for a country to be absolutely
separated, it must have border controls of its own border controls! As such and insofar as absolute
separation is the predicate for absolute immanence, the latter becomes merely an illusionary utopia
fostered by immanentist politics whose aim is to exclude all that which is not to be included in its
immanentist state. The politics of immigration is in fact the realm where this utopia of immanentism
finds its expression. But despite the escalating efforts to bring this utopia into realisation,
governments are struggling in vain to control the freedom of movement for: Migrants and those who
facilitate their migration resort to staggering feats of ingenuity, courage and endurance to assert their
right to move and to flee … The question is how much suffering will be imposed on innocent people,
and how much racism will be stoked up… before governments finally abandon the effort. (Hayter
2000, p. 152) Let us now turn to the second aspect of the figuration of immanentism, technology. The
will to absolute separation rests upon the investment in technological apparatuses by which borders
are controlled and bodies are scanned in order to establish their (il)legitimacy. Several countries are
increasingly developing and implementing different modes of surveillance in order to measure,
anticipate and prevent any intrusion of unwanted individuals. Face-recognition, iris scanning,
fingerprinting, biometric cards, CCTV cameras in ports and detention centres, are all examples of the
technologies of surveillance through which governments are expressing, implicitly if not explicitly, the
imperative to administer and manage life, and subsequently exercise ‘biopolitics’. Nevertheless, the
biopolitics of immigration is not only the management of life but also the management of ‘a waiting-
to-live, a non-life’ Balibar (2002, p. 83). For when technology interacts with biology (with the aim to
categorise and differentiate), it creates what Foucault (2003 [1975], p. 255) calls ‘caesuras within the
biological continuum addressed by biopower’ so much so that the parameter of biological
differentiation and categorisation becomes the currency for life (of those who have legitimate access –
the belonging group, the healthy body), waiting-to-live (of those whose files are still being processed
by immigration officers or in the Home Office),2 [2. They are either placed in detention centres where
they are subjected to the gaze of constant surveillance or released (rather ‘abandoned’) without being
granted permission to work or access to support. In most cases, they have to report to police stations
on regular basis, while some even have to carry an electronic tracking tag/biometric Smart Card.] and
non-life (of those whose cases failed and they are therefore subject to deportation).3 [3. This category
may also include ‘les sans-papiers’ [undocumented people] as well; people who are living and working
in constant anxiety and fear for not having the necessary residence or work permits. They are hence
forced to succumb to exploitation, cheap labour and harsh working conditions. Les sans-papiers may
also be included in the ‘waiting-to-live’ category – in fact, they keep oscillating between the two.] The
fact that technology is an aspect of immanentist biopolitics, is in itself an attestation to how the
political has faded into a state of technicism (Coward 1999, p. 18) – a depoliticisation of society in the
Agambenian sense – in which governments’ policies and debates are merely technical discussions on
the type of mechanisms to be deployed in order to protect borders, filter movements, eliminate
infiltrations, and ultimately, sustain sovereignty by means of measurement and exclusion. Biopolitics,
nowadays, is too pervasive, too subtle that borders are no longer constituted around the ‘physical’
but actualised in the taken-for-granted institutional-organisational-administrative processes; in the
density and ubiquity of information networks. This perpetual actualisation of borders or what we may
refer to as ‘infinite bordering’ is enacted into our very ousia [being], creating far-reaching implications
on ‘bodies that do not matter’, bodies of those left to float in the Strait of Gibraltar, bodies of those
left to die on the US–Mexican border, bodies of those who are, at this very moment, being raped,
tortured and humiliated. Borders are becoming the epitome of Western hypocrisy: on the one hand,
they embody visions of Western progress, civilisation and technological advancements. On the other
hand, they are turning into mass graves, a monolithic disposal of dispensable bodies and unnecessary
existences. This is the dialectical reality of borders!

The sovereign’s right to the ban imperils citizens and refugees alike, forcing them to
perform their conformity to authority vulnerable to exile and bare life
Salter, Professor at the School of Political Studies, University of Ottawa, 2012 (Mark B., “Theory of
the / : The Suture and Critical Border Studies,” Geopolitics, Vol. 17, Iss. 4, October, EBSCO, Accessed
7/10/18 GDI-GN)
Agamben has become one of the most important contemporary social theorists of border for two reasons, though he rarely takes the border on
as an explicit subject in his work.38 Agamben’s discussion of Schmittian sovereign power and the camp play two
signal roles in current writings on contemporary politics, space, and borders .39 Borders represent the
physical limits from which individuals can claim the right to have rights , and the lines to which
sovereigns (mostly) confine the exercise of their absolute power to ban . We can find Agamben’s most
productive thoughts on the border in terms of the ban, which signifies both “the insignia of sovereignty
and expulsion from the community .”40 The ban is both a statement of inclusion and a statement of
exile. For Agamben, the ability to define the biopolitical as a matter of governance , and the ability to exclude – in
different forms – life from the community, are the signals of politics. While for the most part, Agamben focuses on
the legal exclusion of certain groups in the camp, or through the processes of extraordinary rendition or by statute as refugees,
we must accept that, though the camp represents an internal spatialisation of the state of exception , the
border is the threshold that represents the spatialisation of the external, the international as a permanent state of exception.41 He says: “The
originary juridico-political relation is the ban, not only is a thesis concerning the formal structure of sovereignty but also has a substantial
character, since what the ban holds together is precisely bare life and sovereign power”42 For Agamben, this ability
of the sovereign to exclude an individual from political life, to ban them to bare life in which they can
be killed but not sacrificed or exiled, is “more original than the Schmittian opposition between friend
and enemy, fellow citizen and foreigner.”43 And, for Schmitt, the enemy was precisely someone “who no longer
must be compelled to retreat into his borders only .”44 Thus, the ban represents the subjects who can be
abandoned, left the exposure of the effect of the law without any recourse within the law. We see this
vulnerability as individuals pass across the suture, through camps, borders, or transit zones, spaces in
which subjects hold no rights that are not mediated through the recognition or interpellation of a
sovereign. Refugees and citizens are equally vulnerable, in status, if not in resources: there is no prima facie
way to require the recognition of the sovereign . At these moments of examination – when subjects are called on
by the agents of the sovereign to perform their claim to rights – individuals attempt to suture themselves into
the fabric of the community, always already having left that community. Border crossers are always performing
some version of their expectations of sovereign authority .45 There is an in-built anxiety when facing
these moments of suture: will the actors and the audience coperform the sovereign play of identity
and difference? All citizens possess the rights of citizenship, but some are more vulnerable to de-citizenship 742 Mark B. Salter than
others.46 Because this tension cannot be resolved, or rather that tension is productive because it is not resolved, then other objects come to
stand in for the suture. The
passport functions symbolically as the bridge across the interstitial space, a
talisman that protects the bearer undergoing a right of passage, a shield against sovereign
abandonment. In law and in fact, the passport is none of these things, nor is citizenship, nor is belonging.47
We are all equally vulnerable to exile, to sacrifice, to being rendered homo sacer . And, while the majority of
Homo Sacer is concerned with the camp as the internal space of exception, the border is the external space of exception – where sovereign
power does not limit itself either at the line or in the space beyond. Agamben’s
notion of the ban as the primary border
function – the process through which the sovereign decides the degree to which it will grant the
individual, the appellant, rights – thus matches the empirical observations made by Balibar and
others: the essence of sovereign power is the ability to decide whether who counts as human. The border
counts as one of those spaces of decision.

Undocumented immigrants occupy a space of in-betweenness, exploited for their

economic potential while reduced to bare life
Whitley, Doctoral Student, 2015 (Leila Marie, “More than a Line: Borders as Embodied Sites,”
Goldsmiths, University of London, N.D.,
https://research.gold.ac.uk/12314/1/CUL_thesis_WhitleyL_2015.pdf, Accessed 7/9/18 GDI-GN)

Other scholars have made this point, or one very like it, applying the theory of homo sacer to what they
tend to call “illegal immigrants.” Sarah Willen (2010) writes particularly about Israel and its treatment of undocumented
migrants. She says that the patterns of othering and systematic neglect that characterize the way migrants
are treated can be thought of through Agamben’s conceptions of bare life and homo sacer , noting
however that she sees a need to ground this claim in an understanding of specific conditions, patterns
and experiences of particular migrants. Again, by having pre-selected those who are without legal status,
the focus in her work is on the effect of legal dispossession on migrants . Similar to Willen, in his article “’Illegal
Aliens’ and the State, or Bare Bodies vs the Zombie” (2009), Willem Shinkel also argues for conceiving of the ‘illegal
immigrant’ as a modern day homo sacer (quotations in original). Shinkel likens the condition of those denied
legal status in a country to that of Agamben’s homo sacer in that regular laws do not apply to the
migrant determined to be illegal, thereby allowing potential indefinite detention of the “illegal
immigrant.” This potential indefinite detention represents an interruption to the protections normally
extended to citizens and residents of a nation. For Shinkel, it is this exceptional treatment that renders the
illegalized migrant a homo sacer. Charles Lee (2010) gives another account of homo sacer in relation to
undocumented migration. He points to the way that undocumented migrants occupy a space of in-
between-ness, as even while they are denied status in the country as members, they are also not
strangers. This space of the inbetween is harnessed to capital and used to condition the labor of
migrants as disposable and compliant. He writes that, “Migrant workers are not simply excluded: they are
deliberately brought in, sought after, and tolerated by the capitalist regime [...] while their membership is deliberately left
suspended” (Lee, 2010, p.62). Unable to claim protections through citizenship, the undocumented are made
productive to neoliberalism through exploitation of their irregularity, a condition which he sees as
deliberately produced to serve this end. Lee’s study is therefore a consideration of the effects on
migrants of illegality in terms of their labour.

Borders replicate bare life, including migrants into social categories through the
process of exclusion and violence
Whitley, Doctoral Student, 2015 (Leila Marie, “More than a Line: Borders as Embodied Sites,”
Goldsmiths, University of London, N.D.,
https://research.gold.ac.uk/12314/1/CUL_thesis_WhitleyL_2015.pdf, Accessed 7/9/18 GDI-GN)

One way of considering the relation between borders and power is through the work of Giorgio
Agamben. It has become common in current scholarship on illegalized migrants and asylum seekers to
make reference to Agamben's work and to, in a variety of ways, argue that either refugees and/or the
illegalized migrant can be thought of as a contemporary example of bare life and the homo sacer
(Andrijasevic, 2010; Darling, 2009; De Genova, 2010; Doty, 2011; Walters, 2010; Willen, 2010). Agamben has even been described
as one of the most important contemporary thinkers of the border (Salter, 2012). Due to the prevalence of the
use of Agamben’s theory in migration scholarship, I begin this chapter by working through Agamben's
ideas of bare life and the homo sacer. My goal is to connect these concepts to illegalised migrants and to evaluate their
usefulness in describing the ways that borders distribute vulnerability across populations. Bare life is a concept that Agamben
borrows and adapts from the work of Walter Benjamin. In his Critique of Violence (Zur Kritik der Gewalt, 1921)
92 Benjamin writes of bloßes Leben, which can be translated from German as either “mere life” or “bare life.” For
Agamben, this figure of bloßes Leben constitutes the link between violence and law in Benjamin’s work
and itself has an essential connection to juridical violence (1998, p.65). Beginning from Benjamin, Agamben sets out
to think further about the relation between bare life and sovereign power . Agamben begins his
discussion of bare life by offering two terms for life taken from Greek: zoē and bios. He describes the first of these,
zoē, as referring to “the simple fact of living common to all living beings,” while the second, bios, refers to
“the form or way of living proper to an individual or a group” (1998, p.1). He likens the distinction between zoē and
bios to a division between natural life and political life, respectively. Following Foucault, Agamben writes that we arrive at biopolitics when this
natural life is “included in the mechanisms and calculations of State power” (1998, p.3).15 Bare
life is the zone of indistinction
between zoē and bios (VaughanWilliams, 2012, p.99). It is produced through what Agamben describes as “an inclusive exclusion (an
exceptio) of zoē in the polis” (1998, p.7, original emphasis). This means that bare life is life that is socially included
through an act of exclusion. As Agamben writes, “bare life remains included in politics in the form of the
exception, that is, as something that is included solely through an exclusion ” (1998, p.11). This exclusion is a
politically enacted condition and is therefore a form of bios, even as it casts the person against whom it is applied out from bios, or the social
group. It is therefore a paradox and an impossibility even as it exists: the
ban is a form of bios which excludes the banned
from bios, seeking to interact only on the level of zoē. Yet to interact is always bios. This means that bare life
occupies the impossible zone of being both zoē and bios, yet neither ; of being excluded from bios, and yet included
in bios precisely through this act of exclusion.
 Exceptional Violence – Generic
Exceptional production of the inhuman leads to absolute annihilation.
Odysseos 2004 [Louiza, “Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger on the Line(s) of Cosmopolitanism and
the War on Terror,” Conference on the International Political Thought of Carl Schmitt]

The second criticism has to do with the imposition of particular kind of monism: despite the lip-service
to plurality, ‘liberal pluralism is in fact not in the least pluralist but reveals itself to be an overriding
monism, the monism of humanity.” Similarly, Timothy Brennan traces the same tendency in current
cosmopolitan perspectives in that they show ‘an enthusiasm for customary differences, but as ethical
or aesthetic material for a unified polychromatic culture – a new singularity born of a blending and
merging of multiple local constituents.’ There are two ways in which the discourse of a ‘universal
humanity’ has a strong disciplining effect on peoples and politics. The first, noted by a number of
commentators, involves the political refutation of the tolerance witnessed in the cultural or private
sphere; in other words, politically, cosmopolitanism shows little tolerance for what it designates as
‘intolerant’ politics, which is any politics that moves in opposition to its ideals, rendering political
opposition to it illegitimate. Cosmopolitan discourses are also defined by a claim to their own
exception and superiority. They naturalise the historical origins of liberal societies which are no
longer regarded as ‘contingency established and historically conditioned forms of organization’;
rather, they Become the universal standard against which other societies are judged. Those found
wanting are banished, as outlaws, from the civilized world. Ironically, one of the signs of their outlaw
status is their insistence on autonomy, on sovereignty. The second disciplining effect on the discourse
of humanity is seen in the tendency to normalize diverse peoples through ‘individualisation’. The
paramount emphasis placed on legal instruments such as human rights transforms diverse subjectivities
into ‘rights-holder’. As Rasch argues ‘the other is stripped of his otherness and made to conform to the
universal ideal of what it means to be human’. The international human rights regime, which
cosmopolitanism champions as a pure expression of the centrality of the individual and to which it is
theoretically and ontologically committed, is the exportation of modern subjectivity around the globe.
The discourse of humanity expressed through human rights involves a transformation of the human
into the rights-holder: ‘[o]nce again, we see that the term “human” is not descriptive, but evaluative.
To be truly human, one needs to be corrected.’ Thirdly, ‘humanity is not a political concept, and no
political entity corresponds to it. The eighteenth century humanitarian concept of humanity was a
polemical denial of the then existing aristocratic federal system and the privileges accompanying it.’
Outside of this historical location, where does it find concrete expression? The discourse of humanity
finds expression in an abstract politics of neutrality, usually in the name of an international
community which acts, we are assured, in the interest of humanity. James Brown Scott, a jurist and
prominent political figure in the United States in the beginning of the 20th Century, wrote in the
interwar years of the right of the international community to impose its neutral will: The “international
community,” Scott writes, “is coextensive with humanity – no longer merely with Christianity,” it has
become “the representative of the common humanity rather than of the common religion binding the
States. Therefore, the international community “possesses the inherent right to impose its will…and
to punish its violation, not because of a treaty, or a pact or a covenant, but because of an
international need” (283). If in the sixteenth century it was the Christian Church that determined the
content of this international need, in the twentieth century and beyond it must be secularized “church”
of “common humanity” that performs this all-important service. Finally, and most importantly, there is
the relation of the concept of humanity to the other, and to war and violence. In its historical location,
the humanity concept had critical purchase against aristocratic prerogatives, but its utilization by
liberal discourses in the individualist tradition, Schmitt feared, could bring about new and
unimaginable modes of exclusion. Rasch explains: The humanism that Schmitt opposes is, in his words,
a philosophy of absolute humanity. By virtue of its universality and abstract normativity, it has no
localizable polis, no clear distinction between what is inside and what is outside. Does humanity
embrace all humans? Are there no gates to the city and thus no barbarians outside? If not, against
whom or what does it wage its wars? ‘Humanity as such’ Schmitt noted ‘cannot wage war because it
has no enemy, at least not on this planet’. As Ellen Kennedy notes, humanity ‘is a polemical word that
negates its opposite.’ In The Concept of the Political Schmitt argued that humanity ‘excludes the
concept of the enemy, because the enemy does not cease to be a human being’. In the Nomos,
however, it becomes apparent that, historically examined, the concept of humanity could not allow
the notion of justus hostis, of a ‘just enemy’, who is recognized as someone with whom one can make
war but also negotiate peace. Schmitt noted how only when ‘man appeared to be the embodiment of
absolute humanity, did the other side of the concept appear in the form of a new enemy: the
inhuman’ (NE 104). It is worth quoting Rasch’s account at length: We can understand Schmitt's
concerns in the following way: Christianity distinguishes between believers and nonbelievers. Since
nonbelievers can become believers, they must be of the same category of being. To be human, [End
Page 135] then, is the horizon within which the distinction between believers and nonbelievers is made.
That is, humanity per se is not part of the distinction, but is that which makes the distinction possible.
However, once the term used to describe the horizon of a distinction also becomes that distinction's
positive pole, it needs its negative opposite. If humanity is both the horizon and the positive pole of
the distinction that that horizon enables, then the negative pole can only be something that lies
beyond that horizon, can only be something completely antithetical to horizon and positive pole alike
—can only, in other words, be inhuman. Without the concept of the just enemy associated with the
notion of non-discriminatory war, the enemy had no value and could be exterminated. The concept of
humanity, furthermore, reintroduces substantive causes of war because it shutters the formal concept
of Justus hostis, now designated substantively as an enemy of humanity as such. In Schmitt’s account
of the League of Nations in Nomos, he highlights that compared to the kinds of wars that can be waged
on behalf of humanity the Interstate European wars from 1815 to 1914 in reality were regulated, they
were bracketed by the neutral Great Powers and were completely legal procedures in comparison with
the modern and gratuitous police actions against violators of peace, which can be dreadful acts of
annihilation (NE 186). Enemies of humanity cannot be considered ‘just and equal’ enemies.
Moreover, they cannot claim neutrality: one cannot remain neutral in the call to be for or against
humanity or its freedom; one cannot, similarly, claim a right to resist or defend oneself in the sense
we understand this right to have existence in the jus publicum Europeaum. As will examine below in
the context of the war on terror, this denial of self-defence and resistance ‘can presage a dreadful
nihilistic destruction of all law’ (NE 187). When the enemy is not accorded a formal equality, the notion
that peace can be made with him is unacceptable, as Schmitt detailed through his study of the League of
Nations, which had declared the abolition of war, but in rescinding the concept of neutrality only
succeeded in the ‘dissolution of “peace” (NE 246). It is with the dissolution of peace that total wars of
annihilation and destruction becomes possible, where the other cannot be assimilated, or
accommodated, let alone tolerated: the friend/enemy distinction is no longer taking place with a
justus hostis but rather between good and evil, human and inhuman, where ‘the negative pole of the
distinction is to be fully and finally consumed without remainder. With this in mind, I turn to the next
section to the war on terror and its relation to the discourse of humanity and cosmopolitanism.
 Abandonment Violence
Borderlands as sites of unregulated terrain produce bare life through the clandestine
journeys of migrants excluded from accepted means of immigration, killing thousands
Whitley, Doctoral Student, 2015 (Leila Marie, “More than a Line: Borders as Embodied Sites,”
Goldsmiths, University of London, N.D.,
https://research.gold.ac.uk/12314/1/CUL_thesis_WhitleyL_2015.pdf, Accessed 7/9/18 GDI-GN)

In the most literal account, the

borderlands between the US and Mexico stretch along the 2,000 miles of
geographical border between the two countries, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific, passing through four states on the
US side (east to west: Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California) and six on the Mexican (returning, west to east: Baja California, Sonora,
Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo Léon, and Tamaulipas). While the east-west expanse of the borderlands is easy to
identify, the north-south dimensions are more ambiguous . Generally understood as occupying the space on either side
of the geo-political border (Nevins, 2002), the borderlands are unevenly distributed across this zone: their depth
changes based on the population density of the region . The borderlands tend to be understood as the
relatively unregulated spaces that stretch through mountains and deserts between the US and
Mexico. When passage across the US-Mexico borderlands is described, in theory or in literature, authors generally have in mind the
clandestine journeys made across remote spaces, not the queues and passport checks of the urban and/or official points of entry (Boyle, 1995;
Doty, 2011; Urrea, 2004), and it is these remote spaces that are understood as the borderlands. Fewer
people live in these regions
than at other border sites, and there is less control infrastructure in place. On the other hand, at
urban centres along the border, where the border is more tightly restricted and heavily surveyed and
militarized, such as where El Paso meets Ciudad Juárez or where Nogales, Sonora presses up against Nogales, Arizona, the
borderlands shrink to a narrow, dividing line:23 a fence separating one country from the next. Like
migration detention centres, the US Mexico borderlands have also been theorized as a camp by
scholars working in migration and border studies. Roxanne Lynn Doty (2011) argues that the US-Mexico
borderlands can be understood as a site of production of bare life and therefore as a space of the camp in Agamben’s
sense. Doty understands the borderlands as, exactly as I described above, the unregulated and rural desert
spaces of the border. Doty's work primarily focuses on the death and violence to which migrants are
exposed while in these borderlands. Migrants who are unable to pass between the two countries at
official ports of entry attempt clandestine journeys across harsh terrain, taking days to walk from one country into
the next. 23 “A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge ,” writes Gloria Anzaldúa (1987, p.3). 114 Due
to the extremity of the conditions (it is hard simply to carry enough water to survive several days in the desert), many migrants die or come
close to death during their journey (Martinez, et al., 2013). Doty focuses on these deaths and the exposure to death involved in the passage.
She writes
of the bodies of migrants that are found in the desert, and the estimated 5,000 deaths that
have taken place in the region since the implementation of the “prevention through deterrence”
model of border policing (2011, p.601). These deaths are essential to the way that Doty understands the borderlands as camp.

Borderlands subject migrants to the possibility of death of bare life, politically

disenfranchising them from the law
Whitley, Doctoral Student, 2015
(Leila Marie, “More than a Line: Borders as Embodied Sites,” Goldsmiths, University of London, N.D.,
https://research.gold.ac.uk/12314/1/CUL_thesis_WhitleyL_2015.pdf, Accessed 7/9/18 GDI-GN)

The prevention through deterrence model of border policing is a key turning point in the formation of
the border, both for Doty and others (Andreas, 2009; Dunn, 2009; Nevins, 2002). As I detail in the previous chapter, the constellation
of border policing programs that instituted this strategy of border control effectively closed the
border to unauthorized migrants seeking to pass from one country to the next in urban areas. As a result, migrants were
pressed into the less populated regions of the desert, making crossings long and arduous. Doty points out
that the logic of this policy depends upon the possibility of death in these borderlands and would make
little sense without it: the policy reasons that policing in urban areas will be effective to control the borders, and geography will “do the
rest” – i.e. put those who attempt crossings into mortal danger and so either deter or prevent them from making the crossing. As a result of this
exposure to death, she argues that these policies of border policing and closure should be seen as transforming the borderlands into a space of
exception, and the migrants who pass through them into bare life. In light of this function of the borderlands, she writes that “Agamben's
`camp' becomes the vast and varied migrant crossing areas [of the borderlands], not limited to any
specific demarcated or confined space though `grounded' so to speak in specific geographic terrains”
(2011, p.608). In this description, Doty gives us the borderlands as camp as a space that is geographically
bounded, if in a vague way, and yet not geographically determined . By this I mean that Doty conceives of
the borderlands as specifically the rural terrain of mountains and deserts where migrants are exposed
to death. The presence of migrants in this terrain is determined by their having been denied passage at official ports of entry. While this
terrain, and the specific conjunction of its natural features (for example, the arid climate, extreme heat, removal from urban area) are essential
115 to the way this space functions as a camp for Doty, so too is the specific relationship of the migrant to the space. The
clandestine
migrant occupies this terrain differently than, for example, the Tucson resident on a hiking daytrip
who might also physically pass through the same geographic area . In this way, just as I argue in relation to the
migration detention centre, the space of the camp in relation to the borderland is not geographically determined. Instead, what is precise about
the way the space is experienced by the migrant making a clandestine journey across it, and for whom presence in the borderlands is
experienced as proximity to death, is that presence in the space is structured both by a denial of passage at official points of entry and a more
general clandestinity or exclusion. This
clandestinity or exclusion is formed through the casualness of official
policy to the migrant’s death (it is regarded as an unfortunate side effect) and the removal from
protection through official channels or law. In fact, to come into contact with representatives of law in
this space may lead to further abuse and almost surely to deportation if the migrant is already on US land (No More Deaths,
2011). Doty clearly attaches her analysis of the borderlands and her application of Agamben’s theories
to the exposure to death of bare life. In this reading, she seems to interpret the relationship between the homo sacer and death
in a very narrow way. She writes, “US border control strategies have turned and continue to turn much of the
southwestern border areas into spaces of exception, and those who traverse them potentially into
bare life” (2011, p.607, emphasis added). The use of the word potentially seems to mark the chance of death, so that in Doty’s reading the
migrant is only potentially bare life so long as she remains alive. It is in the dead body of the migrant
that Doty locates actual bare life: in the remains of Prudencia (found 2007), and of Mario Alberto Diaz (found 2004). In other
words, Doty presents migrants who pass through the borderlands as potentially bare life, and those who in fact die in the space as actually bare
life. For her it seems that it is the fact of a death, treated casually, that retroactively figures that life as bare. This creates a sort of collapsed
circuit in the theory she uses: to be bare life, one must be dead. What this overlooks is that the experience of
dispossession does not matter only in death, but also in life . It is not only those who are dead who are
bare life, but those who can be killed and who are exposed to death because they have already been
surrendered to death by sovereign power. To be literally killed is only the 116 actualization of having already
been killed by the State – or having already been exposed to death, or politically disenfranchised , in
Foucault’s description. The migrants who pass clandestinely through the borderlands and who survive are
not potentially bare life: they have not been spared from the operation of power that risked their
lives in pressing them into the desert and that regards their deaths as acceptable collateral damage. Instead, their social and political position
is structured by the possibility of their death, and it is this possibility of death, and proximity to it, that constructs them as, in Agamben's
language, bare life.
Modern forms of biopolitics is not a power of life and death but rather the ability to
make live in a certain way and the right to expose unworthy life to precariousness.
Ajana 2005 [Btihaj, “Surveillance and Biopolitics,” Electronic Journal of Sociology]
Embedded within this biopolitical overdetermination is a murderous enterprise. Murderous not
insofar as it involves extermination (although this might still be the case) but inasmuch as it exerts a
biopower that exposes ‘someone to death, increasing the risk of death for some people, or, quite
simply, political death, expulsion, rejection, and so on’ (Foucault 2003 [1976]: 256), and inasmuch as it
is ‘based on a certain occluded but inevitable and thus constitutive violence’ (Zylinska, 2004: 530); a
symbolic violence (manifested, for instance, in the act of ‘naming’ as Butler (in Zylinska, 2004) and
Derrida argue ‘asylum seekers’, ‘detainees’, ‘deportees’, ‘illegal immigrants’, etc) as well as a material
one (for example, placing ‘asylum seekers’ and ‘illegal immigrants’ in detention centres), attesting to
that epistemic impulse to resuscitate the leftover of late modernity and the residual of disciplinary
powers that seek to eliminate and ostracise the unwanted-other through the insidious refashioning of
the ‘final solution’ for the asylum and immigration ‘question’. Such an image has been captured by
Braidotti (1994: 20): Once, landing at Paris International Airport, I saw all of these in between areas
occupied by immigrants from various parts of the former French empire; they had arrived, but were not
allowed entry, so they camped in these luxurious transit zones, waiting. The dead, panoptical heart of
the new European Community will scrutinize them and not allow them in easily: it is crowded at the
margins and non-belonging can be hell. The biopolitics of borders stands as the quintessential domain
for this kind of 11 sorting, this kind of racism pervading Western socio-political imaginary and
permeating the rhetoric of national and territorial sovereignty despite its monolithic use of
euphemism. It is precisely this task of sorting and this act of fragmenting that contemporary modes of
border security and surveillance are designed making ‘the management of misery and misfortune … a
potentially profitable activity’ (Rose, 1999: 260) and evaporating the political into a perpetual state of
technicism (Coward, 1999: 18) where ‘control’ and ‘security’ are resting upon vast investments in new
information and communications technologies in order to filter access and minimise, if not eradicate,
the infiltration and ‘riskiness’ of the ‘unwanted’. For instance, in chapter six of the White Paper,
‘Secure Borders, Safe Haven’ (2002), the UK government outlines a host of techniques and strategies
aimed at controlling borders and tightening security including the use of Gamma X-ray scanners,
heartbeat sensors, and millimetric wave imaging to detect humans smuggled in vehicles.
 Disciplinary Violence
The border penetrates social space, dividing the politically qualified citizenry from the
bare life of migrants
Whitley, Doctoral Student, 2015 (Leila Marie, “More than a Line: Borders as Embodied Sites,”
Goldsmiths, University of London, N.D.,
https://research.gold.ac.uk/12314/1/CUL_thesis_WhitleyL_2015.pdf, Accessed 7/9/18 GDI-GN)

In Border Politics: The Limits of Sovereign Power, Vaughan-Williams (2012) has done some work to move toward
thinking the way that border practices are more dispersed than is sometimes recognized . In particular he
is invested in developing an alternative to the inside/outside concept of borders that takes into
account the way borders are mobilized inside of national space. He draws on Agamben's work to do this. His
theory is interesting to me here both for the way he attempts to give an account of borders that is not
spatially simplistic or linear and in the context of my ongoing engagement with the way that Agamben's
work has been used to theorise borders and practices of bordering in recent border studies scholarship.24 I will begin by
describing his re-theorisation of the border and move from there. Vaughan-Williams works from Agamben's description
of the camp to develop his account of the border. He writes that if Agamben implies that if the space
of the camp was once marginal, it has increasingly become more generalised . By this he seems to mean that if
once camps were located at the edges of social space, increasingly they come to appear within social
space in Agamben's work (airport detention is mentioned, as are gated communities). Pressing on Agamben's argument that camps have
come to be the nomos of the modern,25 Vaughan-Williams writes that it is necessary to pay attention to how
power operates in national space, not only at its territorial limits, and that what is important is how
this operation of power "performatively produces and secures the borders of political community as
the politically qualified life of the citizen is defined against the bare life of the homo sacer " (2012, p.116). In
other words, in a way that is possibly similar to what I have been suggesting, Vaughan-Williams argues for directing
attention in a theory of bordering to the way that populations are produced in relation to power and
differentiated against one another. He is particularly interested in the way that these operations take place throughout the spaces
of political communities and not only in marginal or otherwise spatially distinct locations. Instead of conceiving of sovereign power as limited in
a way that is spatially fixed, he
draws on Agamben to think about sovereign power in relation to the decision
about whether life is expendable. He “substitutes,” in his own language, the “concept of the border of the state
[…for…] the sovereign decision to produce some life as bare (2012, p.16). He develops his idea through the example of
the murder of Jean Charles de Menezes in London and uses de Menezes' murder in order to advance a theory of what he describes as a
generalised biopolitical border.

The experience of the border permeates all aspects of identity, racializing bodies and
exploiting vulnerability
Whitley, Doctoral Student, 2015 (Leila Marie, “More than a Line: Borders as Embodied Sites,”
Goldsmiths, University of London, N.D.,
https://research.gold.ac.uk/12314/1/CUL_thesis_WhitleyL_2015.pdf, Accessed 7/9/18 GDI-GN)

Instead of a generalized biopolitical border, I want to think in terms of a biopolitical border that
comes into being through the enactment of power in relation to bodies , taking into account the
different ways that different bodies are exposed to this power. This means that I want to argue for an
understanding of the border as an operation of power carried out in physical and geographic space ,
but not reducible to that space. I also want to think of the border as an experience of space that is enacted in
relation to the body and to suggest that to understand the spatiality of the border, it is necessary to
think about race and bodies, and about how some bodies are racialized in ways that are bound up
with making them more vulnerable to power than other bodies. This means that I am suggesting both that the experience of the
border, as an experience of encounter with a moment of control, can materialize and dematerialize and that it does so differently for different
people. This also means that while this border must materialize in space, it is not determined by this space where it appears. In
addition to
the suggestion that borders come into being in the space where they are performed, I also want to
argue that the experience of the border is not present only in this moment of the materialization of
control. Instead, I want to consider the way that the relation to the possibility (i.e. vulnerability to the
operation of power) of the appearance of the border as a mechanism of control changes the way
space is experienced and the way bodies move more generally. In what way could particular operations of power -
operations of exclusion and exposure to violence – deployed against certain individuals who occupy that space be considered the essential and
defining features of the border? And if this were shown to be the case, would it be possible to say that we are in the presence of the border – at
the border, so to speak - wherever we experience the effects of this power, and not only when we occupy a physical location understood as
belonging to the boundaries of geographic 124 national space? It is important, of course, that we have very different experiences of the border
depending on who we are: there
is no homogeneity to this we. It would also mean that the border would
have to be understood as existing (through experience) not only in the instance of the materialization of control, but in the
possibility of the appearance of control. This possibility changes the way a person moves through the
space of their life.

Borders simulate subjects and in so doing produce our subjectivity

Lalonde, Professor of Department of Sociology and Legal Studies  (2017), "Patrick, 25
November 2017 , Cyborg Work: Borders as Simulation," 7-8-18 The British Journal of Criminology
azx070, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azx070.”GDI-CL

The aforementioned metaphor of simulation works for contemporary borders given it incorporates (as
described above) each of the six principles agreed upon in the literature concerning contemporary
border security. As borders unfold at an increasing variety of sites, simulation is ultimately employed
to close the gap between virtual and physical governance of mobility. Risk is employed to accomplish
telematic mobility governance and attempt prediction, with dividuals ultimately produced in
databases that serve as the unit of analysis for agents within the border security assemblage. To
constantly acquire and refine data and thus also ascertain the level of risk posed by dividuals, a
variety of third parties are responsibilized in collecting and reporting data on behalf of the state.
These third parties are responsibilized along with the state in serving as part of larger security
continua that rely (in part) on borders to securitize an ever-increasing range of social life in feeding
into neoliberal demands for data required for risk-management efforts focused on prediction and pre-
emption. Such demands and the ‘routine failure of risk’, as Ericson (2007: 12) contends, simply
produces further pressure to collect more data to feed the continuum and govern risk. Diffusion of the
continuum (including borders) in securitizing additional non-traditional sites becomes necessary to
feed the insatiable appetite for data. Risk and insecurity only produce more risk and insecurity in an
ever-amplifying spiral of securitization. Simulation, then, serves to make virtuality possible, producing
dividuals, controlling mobility under the guise of perfect predictability, and securitizing more and
more social life through risk. While the aforementioned analysis exclusively considered the mobility of
individuals, conclusions are transferable to mobility of all things governed through risk, including (but
not limited to) financial instruments, commercial goods and information. The simulation of borders
also coincides with Deleuze’s (1992) description of the society of control. As institutions’ characteristic
of disciplinary society is increasingly abandoned as the model of governance of individuals and
masses, the dividual is produced within the society of control. Power in societies of control is
exercised not through the individual within institutions, but rather through dividuals. The data
characterizing dividuals come to replace the panoptic image of the individual as the focal point of
control. In terms of border simulations, the individual does not need to be actively surveilled at
physical borders to produce decisions regarding mobility. Rather, infinitesimal data points can be
collected (including by non-state third-party actors) indefinitely to ascertain the risk of the dividual,
generate passwords and govern mobility through control.Lastly, the simulation metaphor also avoids
debates surrounding binary border mandates and geographic imaginaries that have plagued recent
interdisciplinary border literature. Simulation can accommodate (at the same time) the continued
existence of traditional sovereign borders alongside ‘diffusion’ to a potentially infinite number of non-
traditional and/or third-party sites. Debates surrounding the changing importance of physical borders
within the context of telemetric borders are also irrelevant given that potentially each and every site
contributes equally to the simulation of surveillance, the border security assemblage, and the
production, analysis, and refinement of data doubles and dividuals. Each site (whether at the frontier
of the nation state or elsewhere) is coded to govern flows and mobilities according to the simulation.
Borders are not really ‘moving’ or ‘spreading’. Rather, simulated borders are truly anywhere and
anytime as part of security continua that serve to securitize an ever-increasing range of social life. This
is the major conclusion that Vaughan-Williams (2010) and de Lint (2008) do not fully consider in
discussing the simulation of borders—namely, via simulation borders exist anywhere social life is
already securitized, anywhere security continua have already reached, and anywhere life and mobility
are already simulated. It is through this conclusion that Baudrillard’s (1981) dystopian supposition—
that the true nuclear fallout is simulation of our entire social world—becomes realized. Through
simulation and virtuality, borders, as Lyon (2005) contends, are truly everywhere.
 Subjugation
The biopolitical process of rendering a person of their humanity enacts a violent cycle
of dehumanization that justifies the elimination of the foreigner
Gilberto Rosas, Associate Professor of Political Science, Washington University in St Louis, 2007,
“Fragile Ends of War,” Social Text 25 (2 (91)): 81-102. GDI John Melton

Nevertheless, it is power relations beyond the state and the historically organized relation of force
that give the law its potency, forged on the bodies of those from Latin America, particularly Mexico,
and in practices of official and extra-official misrecognition of those who culturally or phenotypically
resemble them. An insular vision of the Western state plagues dominant notions of sovereignty. Policing
practices in the Mexican border community of Nogales, Sonora, exercised on the marginalized
populations from Mexico’s interior suggest the decentering of state power to a broader global politics of
labor subordination. The consolidation of neoliberalism in Mexico in the 1990s further compromised
the already fragile sovereignty of the country, rendering its fringes jagged for particular populations,
echoing the aforementioned particular conceptualizations of sovereignty. As on the other side of the
border, this sovereignty was once again forged on the bodies of those who appear foreign, typically
those impoverished from Mexico’s neoliberal turn, the rural marginal en route to becoming 98 Gilberto
Rosas an immigrant. The bolstering of the fragile sovereignty of Mexico at its northern border
demands that broad forms of subjugation are exercised against the marginal rural migrants,
essentially degrading their citizen- ship in the process of immigration. As we have seen, the effects of
such policing include the sometimes official violent practices exercised against the young people of
Barrio Libre. Mexico’s recent embrace of an economy of labor exportation, evi- denced in President
Vicente Fox’s hailing of immigrants as heroes, leads one to speculate that such policing of migrants by
the authorities is likely to dissipate. Unlike the other side of the border, in Mexico the extra-official
nature of policing, particularly evidenced in my narrative of Margarita’s encounter with an officer from
Grupo Beta, underscores the subjective impulses of the police officer. Ethical sensibilities of particular
officers seem to organize official violence in these cases, and such a configuration echoes one of
Agamben’s qualities of life in another of his concepts, the camp, where “petty sovereign[s]” such as
this officer enact a spatialization of the state of exception.36 The sometimes violent disciplining and
subjugation of bodies per- ceived as foreign stabilizes the respective states and serves to reproduce
the border against the traction of alternative geographies of immigrants across the fraying boundaries
of the United States and Mexico. The young people’s practices of literally undermining the international
boundary as well as occasionally passing as marginalized U.S. citizens underscore the fragility of
sovereign forms of power. At the same time, the young people’s own participation in regimes of border
violence underscores the mundane reconstitution of the international boundary. Their mugging
practices further subjugate the already degraded, impoverished bodies of neoliberal organized
immigrants in formation, as do the policing practices of elements of the Mexican state, and the
spectacular, militarized polic- ing practices and forms of racial governance concretized in vigilantism
occurring on the U.S. side of the border. Nevertheless, the overwhelming transgression of the
international boundary, the reversibility of this racial governmentality sparking the imagination of those
in Barrio Libre, the transnational social movements that challenge Border Patrol abuses, as well as the
everyday forms of subaltern struggle and negotiation, such as the elderly newspaper seller’s invocation
of the “Internaciónal,” signal the multiple and, in this case, vexing forms of subjectivity emerging
betwixt, between, and below the United States and Mexico. Although the young people of Barrio Libre
are situated in radically different social positions, they approximate a borderlands consciousness
currently writ large in the immigrant movement across the United States.37

The sovereign imposes political statuses on travelers who cross the border,
strategically utilizing division to encourage conformity while reducing subjects to bare
international life
Salter, Professor at the School of Political Studies, University of Ottawa, 2006 (Mark B., “The Global
Visa Regime and the Political Technologies of the International Self: Borders, Bodies, Biopolitics,”
Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 31, Google Scholar, Accessed 7/9/18 GDI-GN

How does the sovereign condition the possibilities of mobility and structure resistance to the sovereign and make
not only possible but necessary putting one’s self into this state of exception between states ? We know
that the ancient Greeks held the hospitality ethic as among the highest. From its Latin roots, we see the connections on which Agamben might
be tempted to draw upon etymologically between hostia as sacrificial animal, hostis as stranger or enemy, hostilus as hostile or like an enemy,
and hostire as to requite or retaliate; and hospes as host, guest, friend, foreigner. What characteristics of modern sovereignty condition the
presumption toward hostility rather than being a host? How has this possibility of interstate hospitality been so inverted that we now expect
interrogation rather than welcome? The product of the camp bureaucracy is the rendering of the bare life of the
inhabitants into unmourned death. Similarly, the product of border bureaucracy is a structure of
decisions that make unappealable and unmourned the exclusion from the community . The right of
exclusion is absolute and dissolves the difference between force and law. Derrida’s discussion of
hospitality is illustrative of the exceptionality of the relationship between sovereign and suppliant at
the border. The foreign is at once outside of the law, but subject to the law . Hospitality in Derrida’s terms is
always partial and compromised: The foreigner is first of all foreign to the legal language in which the
duty of hospitality is formulated, the right to asylum, its limits, norms, policing, etc. He has to ask for hospitality in a
language which by definition is not his own, the one imposed by the master of the house, the host, the
king, the lord, the authorities, the nation, the State, the father, etc.20 And yet, as Agamben illustrates in terms of the homo sacer, the
appellant is subject to the law, but not a subject in the law. What makes the border a state of exception? The
sovereign decides the political status of the individual as they cross the frontier : national, stateless,
refugee, foreigner, alien. This decision is absolute. The agent of the sovereign’s customs decides not
only the nationality and status of foreigners but of all travelers. There is a zone of indistinction
wherein a traveler possesses not even his/her nationality unless it is confirmed by the decision of the
sovereign. Nothing can compel a particular decision; no appeal can be made; the only expulsion that bears any
intersovereign consequence is denationalization or becoming a refugee . Thus, the traveler only gains
some kind of advantage with other sovereigns once s/he can prove that s/he is abject, will be afforded no
protection whatsoever, Mark B. Salter 171 that one is bare international life, a seeker of refuge , a life that without state
rights but subject to the law of states.

The border represents a constant state of transition, constructing climatic violence to

the environment as well as unmitigated exclusion and exploitation
Whitley, Doctoral Student, 2015 (Leila Marie, “More than a Line: Borders as Embodied Sites,”
Goldsmiths, University of London, N.D.,
https://research.gold.ac.uk/12314/1/CUL_thesis_WhitleyL_2015.pdf, Accessed 7/9/18 GDI-GN)

Instead of there being a space marked in this way, I want to argue that exposure
to death, or being left open to death, is
not a precisely bounded experience, but a more extensive one that is attached to some bodies . In the
desert, undocumented migrants attempting to pass from Mexico into the US are exposed to violence
and to death without access to the protections normally offered by the state . They are made
vulnerable to natural climatic violence; to the violence of others in the region who are able to take
advantage of migrants without any sort of penalty; and opened to the violence of the state at the
hands of its agents. In a literal way, passage through the desert is exposure to death . This status is not,
however, limited to the desert. Instead, it defines the social condition of some migrants in the United States (not all
of whom are undocumented), and for this reason the vulnerability – manifested not only as exposure to death, but also political
killing (deportation), and indeed far beyond this bounded space, affecting all who migrate, or who do not. To 117
occupy the space of a nation-state, in this case the United States, as a body that is understood to belong to an illegalized
migrant is to be held in a position of inclusion through exclusion , and therefore reduced or absent protections, and to
be treated as both disposable and exploitable. Pushing toward thinking vulnerability not in terms of a particular
space, but in terms of a political operation of power that addresses a body, echoes Gloria Anzaldúa’s
understanding of the borderlands. For her, borderlands are not clearly marked spaces which one can
step into and out of. Instead, she writes that, “A borderland is a vague and undetermined space
created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The
prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants. Los atravesados live here” (1987, p.3, original emphasis). This description of the borderlands
theorizes a space that is more defined by inhabitants and experiences than by geography, where an unnatural boundary plays out through the
experience of those who do not easily separate along the dividing line that is imposed. The
border, instead of being merely a
physical space, is described in Anzaldúa’s work as a social relation , as involved in an everyday lived experience, and in
subjectivity and identity (Brah, 1996, p.198).
 Psychological Violence
The interiorization of the border denigrates all aspects of immigrant life, vulnerable to
violent policing and restriction that instills a culture of racism and fear
Goldstein, Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University, and Alonso-Bejarano, doctoral
candidate in Women s and Gender Studies, at Rutgers University, 2017 (Daniel M., Carolina, “E-Terrify:
Securitized Immigration and Biometric Surveillance in the Workplace,” Human Organization; Oklahoma
City Vol. 76, Iss. 1, Spring 2017, Proquest, Accessed 7/7/18 GDI-GN)

The border, as mentioned, has been insourced or interiorized, so that it is now everywhere in the United
States, an immanent frontier of politics and control situated not merely at the edges but inside the
body of the nation. But as our ethnography shows, the border has also been interiorized within the bodies of
undocumented people themselves. Authorities seeking to manage the immigrants' presence in the United
States have targeted their internal worlds for disciplining, deploying sophisticated regulatory regimes to
terrorize undocumented people and so influence their behavior (compare with Willen 2007). This terror is all
the more intense as these regulatory technologies become increasingly pervasive in daily life. E-Verify is
one technology by which this interiorization is accomplished. It is part of the biopolitics of immigrant policing, a form of "soft"
regulation that pushes undocumented people into shadow populations and underground economies where
they are made even more vulnerable, their labor rendered even cheaper and more accessible to the needs of
United States capital, and their ability to demand their rights as workers inhibited . As Gomberg-Muñoz and
NussbaumBarberena have observed (2011:366), "Cheap labor is not necessarily docile labor," and E-Verify as a biopolitical instrument is
effective in heightening worker docility. The
production of terror is critical in this regard: through technologies
like E-Verify, the state can penetrate the inner world of the undocumented immigrant to affect a
particular policy outcome by inducing fear of deportation within the subject and causing them to
make choices that appear to be agentive but are in fact highly overdetermined. In this, E-Verify and other
immigration-related technologies, laws, and programs are not unlike other forms of neoliberal
govemmentality (Inda 2013), which strive to inculcate particular subject dispositions marked by qualities of self-
regulation and individual responsibility-here, the immigrant is even expected to become the primary
actor responsible for her own removal. As we have mentioned, the research on which this article is based was conducted using
a methodology of activist anthropology, which enabled us to collect better and richer data while contributing to local struggles for the rights of
the undocumented. This contribution did not come through working as volunteers in immigrant advocacy organizations, or marching with the
crowds in New York City on International Workers Day, or getting arrested protesting detentions and deportations (Goldstein 2014). Rather, the
contributions of activist anthropology came through empowering local people-historically, anthropology's "informants"-to themselves become
ethnographers, and so to become the scholars of their own experience, able to use the data they collect for their own purposes of liberation. In
addition to the play we co-authored for the community, our principal collaborators used the process of conducting ethnographic research-semi-
formal interviews in particular-as a means for informing people (themselves workers who had been injured or otherwise abused on the job)
about their rights and helping them to seek redress. As a result, the fieldwork itself became a form of activism, through which we learned about
local problems while educating people about their rights as workers in the United States. This was not something that we had counted on or
designed as a component of the research; it emerged organically, through the leadership of our collaborators, as they came into their own as
ethnographers and made of our project an instrument of collective resistance. The story of how this happened is longer than space here allows,
and the four of us are currently co-authoring an ethnography describing in more detail our research process and its outcomes. But it was
through this approach to research that we derived our insights about the local impacts of E-Verify, the felt experience of fear that it generates,
and the confusion and uncertainty to which it contributes. Although
the securitization of immigration is a phenomenon
of the 21 st century, the political power of fear has a long history as part of the public discourse about
immigration in the United States (Ngai 2004). Indeed, if fear of the terrorist, criminal, undocumented
immigrant has been mobilized in the United States to rally support for the increasing securitization
and interiorization of the United States border, fear of detention and deportation has also been mobilized
to keep the non-citizen and her family in place. But if technologies like E-Verify are intended to terrify, they are also unlikely
to make the undocumented give up the promise of finding prosperity for themselves and their families in the United States. What this reveals,
however, are the ways in which state-sponsored
security discourses and programs cultivate fear among all
segments of the population, citizen and undocumented alike, contributing to a climate of racism, uncertainty,
and despair with which everyone must cope.

Biopolitics instills terror and fear of deportation in immigrants

Goldstein, Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University, and Alonso-Bejarano, doctoral
candidate in Women s and Gender Studies, at Rutgers University, 2017

(Daniel M., Carolina, “E-Terrify: Securitized Immigration and Biometric Surveillance in the Workplace,”
Human Organization; Oklahoma City Vol. 76, Iss. 1, Spring 2017, Proquest, Accessed 7/7/18 GDI-GN)

This complex legal assemblage, then, combines the "hard" federal threat of jail and removal with the
"softer" state incitement to hide, relocate, or self-deport . Although E-Verify is not technically about immigrant removal,
the existence of the militarized border, though not locally present, is a persistent reminder of the precarious
situation of the undocumented and the potential for deportation if they step out of line. Fear and
anxiety are the common responses to this situation , feelings that are intensified by the cross-cutting, mutually
reinforcing laws across legal scales: "Federal laws control who comes in and who is expelled, and
policies at the state and local levels shape how immigrants live once they are in the country, in effect, complementing
each other. Indeed, a key feature of the U.S. immigration regime today is its multilayered character, composed
of federal, state, and local legislation with each layer magnifying the power and control of the other layers "
(Menjívar and Enchautegui 2015:111). E-Verify in this context operates in conjunction with other laws and practices to push undocumented
workers out of the legal employment market and into underground settings where they are even more exploitable. The
terror and
anxiety found in such settings is typical of what one might expect to find among the "shadow
populations" of the United States.
 The Camp
Border biopolitics create the conditions for genocide.
Gilberto Rosas, Associate Professor of Political Science, Washington University in St Louis, 2007,
“Fragile Ends of War,” Social Text 25 (2 (91)): 81-102. GDI John Melton

Michel Foucault’s analyses of sovereignty emphasize its fragility. The philosopher suggests that
modern forms of sovereignty suppress ongoing struggles below dominant political institutions and
that contemporary institutions such as the law continuously reinstate relations of conquest. Public
rites of torture and other acts of sovereign violence and the excess beyond such acts of punishment
consolidate state power. These spec- tacles of state violence inculcate into the public the awesome
violence of sovereign power relations, giving material and physical force to the state’s institutions.
Notably, Foucault suggests that under the sophistication of modern political arrangements public
enactments of torture disappear.4 Moreover, he maintains that at the sometimes violent fringes of
state power the silent struggles underpinning sovereignty become unveiled: Increasingly, wars, the
practices of war, and the institutions of war tended to exist, so to speak, only on the frontiers, on the
outer limits of the great State units, and only as a violent relationship — that actually existed or
threatened to exist — between States.5 Furthermore, Foucault elaborates on two overriding logics of
biopower or the modern forms of regulatory control of a population, those of “making live” and “letting
die.” With respect to the former, certain knowledge- power relations such as health care, welfare, and
the birthrate are marshaled to optimize collective life, “making” particular populations thrive.
Conversely, he couples the negative referent of biopower, or “letting” a particular population or
subset of a population die, to racism. “Letting” a particular population die requires an appearance of
biological differ- ence between those who must live and those who must die. Racism con- stitutes this
fissure between those subject to optimized life and merciless disposability.6 Giorgio Agamben’s recent
influential reformulation of Foucault’s ideas maintains that sovereignty is founded upon a legal
provision involving a state of emergency. Agamben terms this the state of exception, a moment where
the law is suspended, revealing its unmitigated relationship between violence, state power, and crisis.
It is particularly embodied in policing practices.7 He further maintains that modern refugees and their
condi- tion of statelessness generate “the forms and limits of a coming political community.”8
Nevertheless, Agamben’s formulation erases the contingent nature of sovereignty, the struggles below
its artifices found in Foucault’s accounting. He likewise neglects Foucault’s emphasis on racism as the
construction of killable or at least disposable subjects, dynamics of par- ticular import for an analysis of
sovereignty production in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Institutions such as slavery and the
contemporary penal system, con- temporary venues of state violence as in Palestine and southern
Mexico, the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the camps of Guantánamo Bay, and other colonial or
neocolonial situations require a recalibration of such ideas. As Achille Mbembe observes, such venues
develop and perfect oppressive, often deadly, biopolitical, or what he terms “necropolitical,”
technologies. These are exercised on the marginalized bodies of those of the Global South and
epitomized in the plantation system.9 In this respect, Agamben’s paradigmatic example of the state of
exception, the Nazi genocidal practices of concentration camps, deserves to be revisited. Writes Hannah
Arendt: “there are no parallels to the life in the concentra- tion camps. Its horrors can never be fully
embraced by the imagination for that very reason it stands outside of life and death.”10 For such
camps to exist, the European Jewish population was effectively dehumanized, rendering them
radically other, unworthy of life, or worthy of life only in the banality of evil that defined the
concentration camp. That is, they had to be racialized. Many analyses of Nazi death camps have noted
that the exercise of brutal state force and the machinery of terror once reserved exclusively for the
colonies were effectively turned on a population within Europe. This is to say that ongoing racial,
colonial, and imperial relations from which such violent biopolitical technologies develop seem to
disrupt Foucault’s aforementioned suggestion of the “disappearance of torture as spectacle.” The
exercises of such technologies on non-Western bodies likewise disrupt his conceptualization of racism
and challenge Agamben’s legal genealogy of killable subjects. The conquest and colonization of over half
of Mexico in the nineteenth century — including all or parts of California, Texas, Arizona, Nevada, Utah,
Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Kansas — con- stitute an often neglected example of
U.S. empire. Although this affair hardly approaches the scale of other imperial moments, it was
organized discursively and ideologically in racial terms. Nineteenth-century Mexi- cans were largely
conceived of as debased because of their intermarriage with indigenous peoples. They were likewise
strongly associated with the enslaved black population. Expansionists who desired to conquer all of
Mexico were refused because of widespread anxieties about incorporat- ing such an “inferior”
population. Such views were largely held toward Mexican men. Mexican women, in contrast, tended to
be eroticized as hypersexual beings. Such qualities continue to pervade contemporary anti-immigrant
discourse.11

Migration detention centers mimic the camp, suspending legal rights and subjecting
migrants to physical violence and psychological abuse
Whitley, Doctoral Student, 2015 (Leila Marie, “More than a Line: Borders as Embodied Sites,”
Goldsmiths, University of London, N.D.,
https://research.gold.ac.uk/12314/1/CUL_thesis_WhitleyL_2015.pdf, Accessed 7/9/18 GDI-GN)

The work that has drawn on the theory of the camp and applied it to border spaces has so-far tended to
focus on two particular kinds of spaces. The first of these is migration detention centres . Drawing on
Agamben’s theory of the camp, scholars working in the field of migration studies have argued that migrant
detention centres can be understood as camps (Andrijasevic, 2010; Diken and Laustsen, 2005; Perera, 2002; Walters, 2010).
These accounts tend to understand migrant detention centres as a space of exception , where nation-states
enact exclusion (Andrijasevic, 2010, p.149), physically incarcerating those who do not (or do not yet) have a clear legal
right to remain in a country. Earlier work addresses Australia’s now closed Woomera detention centre in particular. For example,
Diken and Laustsen (2005) argue that Woomera functioned as a camp because it was a zone of indistinction, its existence possible only when
exception became rule. As another example, Papastergiadis (2006) writes that Woomera can be understood as a camp because within it
refugees were excluded from civic life, held indefinitely without cause in detention and divested of rights. The detention centre existed, he
writes, at the “edges of public visibility and the limits of the law” (Papastergiadis, 2006, p.436). More recently, arguments have also been made
for understanding Italy’s Lampedusa detention centre as a space where the state of exception is enacted and therefore as a camp 110
(Andrijasevic, 2010, p.150). In this space the normal rule of law is suspended and rights no longer apply. Migrants
held in the centre
are treated in degrading ways that violate what would be their rights, if these rights could in fact be
claimed or protected. Speaking more widely, William Walters points to all migration detention centres used in Western states as
camps. They are all spaces, he explains, “where the exception becomes the norm, where those without the ‘right to have rights’ are exposed to
indeterminate waiting times, the risk of arbitrary treatment, and the threat of physical and psychological abuse” (2010, p.94). This
exposure to violence, and the lack of legal protections that are normally provided to those recognized
as citizens, materializes the camp in the space where migrants are indefinitely incarcerated. In all of
these accounts, migration detention centres are understood as camps because they are spaces where
the “right to have rights” is suspended for migrants who are detained, and because migrants can be
treated in an arbitrary and cruel way, exposed to both physical and psychological abuse. Inside of this
space, legal
protection is revoked by the law, exposing migrants to violence. This is a particular
mechanism of power that is enacted inside the migration detention centre. Therefore what an
analysis of migration detention centres as camps points at is a particular mechanism of power that is
enacted within these spaces. It is the operation of power that illegalised migrants experience in detention centres that indefinitely
suspends the normal rule of law. However, this operation of power is not bound to the space; it is not limited by the space; and it does not
ontologically determine the space. So how can these understandings of the migration detention centre account for the ways that some people
are vulnerable to being placed in these detention centres, and how is this vulnerability experienced not only inside of the walls of detention, but
outside of them as well? How can an analysis of migration detention centre as camps account for the vulnerability to detention, the cruel and
arbitrary treatment of those who can be detained, not only inside of the space of the detention centre, but also before their arrival and after
their release? Migration detention centres are experienced in a spatial way and are structured by firm and
guarded boundaries. There is no ambiguity about which space is included within the migration detention centre or when one is inside
or outside of that space. However presence in the space of the migration detention centre alone 111 does not
determine whether it is experienced as a site of violence for a given individual . Still more sinister, exiting
the space of the migration detention centre does not guarantee that one has exited the space in
which violence is permissible. The argument is that the migrant detention centre is a camp for those
who are indefinitely detained in the space, whose rights are suspended, and who are excluded from
social life through their internment. However, not everyone who occupies the physical space of the detention
centre experiences this power in the same way. Guards are also present in the detention centre, for
example, but are positioned differently in relation to power . On the other hand, for those who are the targets of power,
exiting the physical space of the detention centre is not enough to free oneself of the systems of
camp; and those who evade the migration detention centre, or who have not yet been sent there, but whom it stalks, are not unexperienced
with or unexposed to the camp. For this reason, there is need for a more sophisticated account of space and of the operations of power that
produce a position of vulnerability.

The camp strips migrants of freedom, distinguishing legal from illegal to produce bare
life
Whitley, Doctoral Student, 2015 (Leila Marie, “More than a Line: Borders as Embodied Sites,”
Goldsmiths, University of London, N.D.,
https://research.gold.ac.uk/12314/1/CUL_thesis_WhitleyL_2015.pdf, Accessed 7/9/18 GDI-GN)

What can these biopolitical theories as applied to migrants and migration tell us about borders ? And
about the relationship between borders and bodies? In the case of both Agamben and Mbembe, the theories of
biopolitics and how they address different bodies are distinctly spatialised. Looking at how these
spatial operations of power function can help to inform a consideration of the way that borders
function as spatial operations of power. For this reason, in this section I will look at the way that both Agamben and Mbembe
spatialize their theories. I will use these two models and the implications of these spatialisations to help me to set up a discussion of the space
of the border. For Agamben, the site that he identifies as producing the condition of the homo sacer and
bare life is the camp (Lemke, 2011, p.56). The camp is therefore essential to his work. Like the rest of his theory, Agamben develops his
theory of the camp by drawing on the historical example of the concentration camps of National Socialism. Agamben asks what made
the extreme and violent conditions inside of the camps possible and about the juridico-political
structure of the camp. The structure that he claims is at the root of the camp is the state of exception.
It is the declaration of a state of emergency or exception that becomes the basis for suspending
normal law and in particular for suspending the protections of freedom guaranteed by normal law (Agamben,
2005, p.50). By way of example, Agamben explains that when the Nazis took power in Germany on February 28, 1933, they issued a decree,
nominally 107 for the protection of the people and the State. This decree suspended the articles of the Weimar constitution that protected
personal liberty, freedom of expression and assembly, and of privacy in the home and in personal communications (Agamben, 1998, p.168). He
explains that this exceptional suspension of normal juridical rule is made permanent in the camp. He writes, “In the camp, the state of
exception, which was essentially a temporary suspension of the rule of law on the basis of a factual state of danger, is now given a permanent
spatial arrangement” (1998, p.169). Insideof the camp, anything is possible. It makes no sense to ask whether
what happens inside of the camp is illegal or legal, precisely because the camp is formed through the
confusion and indistinction that results when exception to law becomes norm. The effect of this is that those
who enter the camp also enter a zone of indistinction . Inside the camp, Agamben writes, the concept of the
subjective rights or the juridical protections of the inhabitants no longer make any sense. The
question, then, is not one of how the atrocities committed against human beings in the camps could have happened, but is instead how a
human being could be politically transformed into bare life, so that nothing that was done to them
would register as a crime.

Biopower causes genocide

Salter 2006 [Mark, “The Global Visa Regime and the Political Technologies of the International Self:
Borders, Bodies, Biopolitics,” Alternatives 31, pp. 167-189]

Foucault argues that we must progress from a theory of sovereignty, which “is bound up with a form of
power that is exercised over the land and the produce of the land, much more so than over bodies and
what they do,” toward a theory of a “disciplinary” society that constitutes and normalizes in addition to
rejecting and excluding.27 I would argue it is a crucial supplement to Agamben’s notion of sovereign
decision that we examine Foucault’s biopolitics and the disciplinary society, which helps us explain and
understand the way in which obedience and choice are structured through a power/knowledge
network. Zygmunt Bauman’s investigation of the Holocaust is crucial to my reading of obedience and
power in this respect: he argues that the rationality of Jewish collaborators was undone in the
asymmetrical environment of the Nazi state. The question of agency in this case cannot simply be
understood as collaboration: “Stakes and resources are manipulated by those who truly control the
situation: who are able to make some choices too costly to be frequently selected by those whom
they rule, while securing frequent and massive choices which bring closer their aims and reinforce
their control.”28 Power constructs the obedient subject but does not simply repress the disobedient:
resistances are possible. Thus, we must look not simply at the “choice” to enter a state, but at how
that condition of mobility is rendered such that travelers facilitate their own entry into this state of
exception where their rights are abrogated.
 Racism
Biopower operates through racism to illegalize migrants, justifies “killing” the migrant
through exploitation and exclusion
Whitley, Doctoral Student, 2015 (Leila Marie, “More than a Line: Borders as Embodied Sites,”
Goldsmiths, University of London, N.D.,
https://research.gold.ac.uk/12314/1/CUL_thesis_WhitleyL_2015.pdf, Accessed 7/9/18 GDI-GN)

The discussion of biopower as it operates through a racial division is also present in Foucault’s work ,
upon which Mbembe draws. In Society Must be Defended, Foucault writes that “racism is inscribed as the basic
mechanism of power, as it is exercised in modern states” (2003, p.254). He explains racism as a way of
regulating exposure to death. The first function of racism is to fragment the population, creating and
separating groups from one another (2003, p.255). This is a means of exercising control over the population. After the
fragmentation of the population, the second function of racism is to broker the relationship of war: in order for
one to live, the other must die. Racism is therefore enacted as this differential exposure to death. It is
the difference between “what must live and what must die” (2003, p.254). Within a biopolitical system, this
death of the other is understood as making life in general healthier: if the other is a threat, then the other dies so that I may live. In this way,
killing becomes acceptable as a means to eliminate a biological threat. Racism is therefore, for Foucault, about the distribution of death. Race or
racism makes killing acceptable (2003, p.256). As he writes, “racism is the indispensable precondition that allows
someone to be killed, that allows others to be killed. Once the State functions in the biopower mode,
racism alone can justify the murderous function of the State” (2003, p.256). In Foucault’s usage, killing the
other does not only refer to the murder of the other. He also understands the exposure of the other to death, increasing
their risk of death, or enacting political death as forms of killing. Understanding killing in this way means that much of what I
describe in the previous section of this chapter, and the effects of illegalization, can be understood in a way that is
slightly different from what Agamben’s work might suggest. It means that the exposure of migrants to
death through their exposure to the desert that was instituted in US border policy from the late 1980s
onward, as I detail in Chapter Two, can be thought of as killing. This is especially true if we work from Ruth Gilmore's
definition of racism as “the statesanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-
differentiated 106 vulnerability to premature death” (2007, p.28). It also means that the state’s withdrawal of
material support from refugee applicants whose claims have been denied, as discussed by Darling and as I
summarize in the last section, could be understood as killing. And it means that deportation , in that this is political
death in very explicit form – the removal from the political community – is killing. Following Foucault, all of these
things have to be understood in relation to racism. Racism is their precondition and what makes them possible. Only
racism can justify these functions of the State. This suggests an import shift away from thinking of
illegalization as the cause of dispossession , toward thinking of law as a means to carry out racism.

Biopower is utilized by the alt right to suffocate feminist movements and whitewash
immigration history to suit their desires
Gilberto Rosas, Associate Professor of Political Science, Washington University in St Louis, 2007,
“Fragile Ends of War,” Social Text 25 (2 (91)): 81-102. GDI John Melton

The inner workings of the U.S. state tend to veil the use of military technology, equipment, and tactics
in the policing of immigration. These tendencies resonate with the recent deployment of
counterinsurgency techniques in what a body of critical social science as well as activist knowledges
has come to recognize as the militarization of the border.12 Indeed, the Pentagon’s Center for the
Study of Low Intensity Conflict aided in the writing of the Border Patrol Strategic Plan: 1994 and Beyond,
and senior officials have publicly acknowledged this.13 Several well-respected inter- national human
rights organizations have published reports documenting the effects of the militarization of the border,
specifically Border Patrol abuse, harassment, and sexual assault of immigrants, including those from
Central America as well as U.S. Latinos. White supremacist imaginings of citizenship inform the history
of such militarized policing practices. Beginning with the origin of the immigrant police force early in
the twentieth century in the Johnson- Reed Act, the organization has relied on former military
personnel to fill its ranks. Several were klansmen.14 Others were former Texas Rangers, a paramilitary
organization with a legacy of racial terror in the southwest that triggered an incipient, semiorganized
insurgency and broad cultural forms of resistance among local Mexican populations. A hegemonic racial
polarity of privileged whiteness and marginalized blackness within the contemporary United States
obscures the imperialist genealogy of this racial formation, where those hegemonically conceived of
as “irreducibly foreign” are situated.15 Popular ontological signifiers of race such as the speaking of
subordinated languages, hygienic practices, forms of dress, as well as phenotype render immigrants and
sometimes those who resemble them subject to official and extra-official scrutiny. Such a
reconsideration of race underscores the significance of the culturally recuperative projects that Américo
Paredes, José Limón, and other scholars have undertaken as documentation of imperial instantiations of
power and the challenges to it.16 The Mexican state is also involved in the operations of power at the
border. The itineraries of migrants through Mexican border communi- ties such as Nogales, Sonora,
Mexico, and the introduction of notions of sovereignty production into an analysis of such
communities complicate the analysis of those who must live, those who must die, and those who
must be either officially or extra-officially subjugated.17 A significant body of scholarship links racism
and gender hierarchy to the politics of labor subordination in the maquiladoras in the border
communities of Mexico. Social scientists have likewise traced the ethnic struggles of mestizo-indio
relations in border communities.18 Ana Alonso in her ethnography of nineteenth-century Namiquipa
Chihuahua, a state on Mexico’s northern frontier, effectively demonstrates the violent relations
embedded in the founding of the state. Such processes included a whitening of history, a literal
“bleaching of a population,” that positioned the Namiquipan peasantry as gatekeepers of civilization
against the barbarous indigenous nomads. Such processes had racialized underpinnings, including the
whit- ening of history, the literal “bleaching of a population.” Other scholars have drawn upon
Agamben’s work to suggest that the ongoing “femicide” in Ciudad Juárez, where hundreds of women
have disappeared or been brutalized and killed, represents the denationalization of women’s rights
and the violent disenfranchisement of their Mexican citizenship.19

Biopolitical control disproportionately marginalizes certain groups, power dynamics

intersect and supplement racism
Whitley, Doctoral Student, 2015 (Leila Marie, “More than a Line: Borders as Embodied Sites,”
Goldsmiths, University of London, N.D.,
https://research.gold.ac.uk/12314/1/CUL_thesis_WhitleyL_2015.pdf, Accessed 7/9/18 GDI-GN)

What he does not address is the way that some

are more vulnerable than others. Instead, in Agamben’s account,
without differentiation, we
are all exposed to the possibility of becoming bare life. Agamben’s failure to
attend to the differences in vulnerability across a population has a flattening effect in his theory . As
Judith Butler points out, the universality Agamben assumes exists between all subjects in an
undifferentiated way does not account for the ways that “power functions differentially to target and
manage certain populations” (Butler, 2004, p.68). In other words, the claim has a flattening effect on the
conception of power in that it obscures the differential ways that power addresses things like race,
gender, class and sexuality (Coleman and Grove, 2009, p.498). While in an abstracted way it might be possible to say
that we are potentially homines sacri, we are not all constituted as homines sacri, and our risks are
not all the same. For this reason, Agamben’s theory becomes what Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky (2005) has called an empty
abstraction. She writes that this abstraction: …is not only an affront to the concrete sufferings of the victims
[of the Holocaust] and of their relatives. It does not only level out the differences between victims and
perpetrators, between witnesses and those born afterwards . It also effaces existent and – through the implementation
of globalization – increasing class differences between rich and poor, north and south, between people who fulfill and those who deviate from
the norm. (Deuber-Mankowsky, 2005, p. 10) Agamben’s undifferentiated paranoic vision that we all – and he too by implication – may be fixed
as bare life may in part follow from the historical example he works from. While he generalizes outward from his chosen historical example,
Agamben writes and thinks with the Holocaust. Agamben grants this genocide exceptional status in his work. He describes the Nazi regime as
responsible for “the most extreme conditio inhumana that has ever existed on earth” (1995, p.166). This
is a genocide that took
place in the centre of Western Europe and is one that saw the rights of citizens stripped, and the
systematic killing of these former citizens. Though, as Deuber-Mankowsky points out, the generalization of the experiences of
those who faced the concentration camps to everyone is an affront to those who were faced with atrocity, equally serious is the way that
Agamben’s focus on this historical event may predispose him to fail to recognize the ways that some are more vulnerable to the violence of
power and political dispossession than others. By looking only at an event inside of Europe, Agamben
fails to see the
relationships of domination enacted through biopower between Europe and people in and from other
parts of the world and the lasting effects of this colonial history. There are of course other historical examples of
atrocity to draw on in thinking about biopolitics and the state of exception that would make these
dynamics more visible. In his piece “Necropolitics,” Achille Mbembe pulls the discussion of biopower and of the
social distribution of death and vulnerability toward some of these other historical atrocities . For
Mbembe, it is impossible to talk about modern terror without discussing slavery. He points to slavery as one of the first
important historical instances of biopolitical experimentation . He explains that in slavery, the slave is fully dominated,
alienated from his or her natal land, and confronted with social death – social death being in Mbembe’s words, “expulsion from humanity
altogether” (2008, p.160). The slave exists in a state of injury: kept alive, but only as an instrument of labour and with a price. The master,
who owns the slave as an object is owned, can inflict violence upon the slave “in a cruel and
intemperate manner” (2008, p.160). Race is crucial to these intersections and experiences of power
(Mbembe, 2008, p.161). Mbembe traces the technologies of racism, including the selection of races, forced
sterilization and prohibitions against mixed racial marriages, and genocides – all aspects of engineering race in
the population – to the colonies and to imperialism . For Mbembe, “what one witnesses in the Second World War is the extension
to the ‘civilized’ peoples of Europe of the methods previously reserved for the ‘savages’” (2008, p.161). Therefore what is most important is not
only to pay attention to what happened in Europe, but to connect National Socialism to slavery, to colonial imperialism, to the technologies of
mechanized death, and to Gaza and the West Bank. In particular, Mbembe argues that it
is necessary to look at the colony and
colonialism to understand the suspension of juridical order, the implementation of the state of
exception, and the violent operations of power.

Biopolitics makes racism inevitable while society internalizes it. Makes all of the aff’s
impacts inevitable
Fowler, Ph.D, Instructor at Washington State University, 2016 (Rebecca, “U.S. biopolitical Geographies
of the Migrant,” borderlands e-journal 15(1), GDI-JM)

Biopower serves as a useful concept in highlighting the workings of power behind these U.S.
immigration disappearing acts. In his discussion of government and governmentality, Michel Foucault
(2003) highlights the emergence of biopower that occurred with the transformation of power in the
18th century with the rise of the nation- state. The divine right of the monarch to ‘take life or let live’
was replaced with the modern state’s function and preoccupation in administering and prolonging life,
in ‘generating forces, ordering them, [and] making them submit [rather than] destroying them’ (Foucault
2003, p. 139). This new technology comprised a ‘biopolitics’ of the human race’—a ‘normalization’ of
society in the state’s administration of control over both the individual body and the social body.
Foucault describes the state’s newfound function of ‘taking control over life’ as a series of ‘seizures of
power’ or ‘adjustments’ to the sovereign- juridical order (2003, p. 243). The first adjustment targets the
anatomic in disciplining and utilizing the body as a machine; the second focuses on the biological in the
propagation and homogenization of the human species. In its aim to optimize the population as a
whole, these first two adjustments of biopower work in tandem to subject bodies ‘to precise controls
and comprehensive regulations’ to ensure the homeostasis of a society by eliminating irregularities
and anomalies in the social body (Foucault 1978, pp. 136-37). Although Foucault emphasizes the state’s
newfound function with the primacy of life, he does not ignore the state’s role in the propagation of
death, for the new power that would foster life, whose ‘main role was to ensure, sustain, and multiply
[it]’ could still ‘disallow it to the point of death’ (1978, p. 138, Foucault’s emphasis). The third
adjustment, ‘state racism’, would constitute the ‘basic mechanism of power’ of the state in providing a
template for dividing those who would be made to live from those who must die. The significance of
state racism as a technology cannot be overestimated in that the state could ‘scarcely function’
without it. In a word, racism would allow for the ‘function of death’ in the modern state’s right to kill:
What in fact, is racism? It is primarily a way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under
power’s control: the break between what must live and what must die. The appearance within the
biological continuum of the human race of races, the distinction among races, the hierarchy of races,
the fact that certain races are described as good and that others, in contrast, are described as inferior:
all this is a way of fragmenting the field of the biological that power controls. It is a way of separating
out the groups that exist within a population. It is, in short, a way of establishing a biological-type
caesura within a population that appears to be a biological domain. This will allow power to treat that
population as a mixture of races, or to be more accurate, to treat the species, to subdivide the species it
controls, into the subspecies known, precisely, as races. That is the first function of racism: to
fragment, to create caesuras within the biological continuum addressed by biopower. (Foucault 2003,
pp. 254-55) Racism is thus not an effect, but a tactic of state technology that is used to create
biopolitical enemies against whom society must defend itself (Stoler 1995, p. 59). In the feverish age of
neoliberal globalization, citizenship technologies have become fused with those of state racism to
fragment the biological field that biopower controls as biopolitics are played out on the bodies of
global citizens and racialized non-citizens. Within this context, the brown body of the ‘illegal alien’ has
been marked by the state as an external threat, both to society and to state sovereignty and
governmentality. Within dominant discourses, undocumented immigrants have been constructed as
‘unethical subjects … unable or unwilling to enterprise their lives or manage their own risks’ (Inda
2006, p. 108). With the rise of neoliberal rule and the ideological decree of privatized and individualized
government of risk, proper neoliberal citizens are expected to utilize market mechanisms in bearing the
responsibility for their own social security and for insuring themselves and their families against ill
fortune of poor health, accidental loss, and/or unemployment. The racialized anti-citizen’s individual
lack of resources is thus equated with a pathological irresponsibility and inability to contribute to the
wellbeing of the social body. Biopower tactics incorporate ‘anti-citizen’ regimes of truth that construct
as pathological the undesirable body of the ‘illegal alien’, associating it with crime and disease and as
a cancer that must be excised from the social body. The term ‘illegal alien’ has permeated dominant
discourse to the extent that our society has come to associate all unauthorized border crossings with
those migrants originating from south of the border. Ultimately, dominant discourses that scapegoat
the brown body of the Mexican migrant are integral to the function of state racism, not only in the
maintenance of a hegemonic U.S. citizenship and identity, but also to the production of docile migrant
bodies and the control of segregated, hierarchized populations intrinsic to the machinery of neoliberal
capitalism. Immigration scholar Nicholas de Genova has written on this phenomena, describing how
illegality has become inscribed on the brown bodies of Mexican migrants. The socio-legal production of
migrant illegality works to systematically dehumanize and exploit these brown bodies for their labor.
The term ‘illegal alien’ exacerbates migrant vulnerability in that it serves to render these people not
fully human in the minds of many Americans.

Race as a concept can be seen as an expression of biopower-mapping race takes part

in an ongoing series of geographical knowledges that make known the biopolitics of
its space
Wood, Lecturer at the University of Newcastle, 2007 (David, Chapter 22, Space, Knowledge
and Power: Foucault and Geography, eds. Stuart Elden, Professor of Political Theory and Geography and
Jeremy Crampton, Ph.D The Pennsylvania State University, 2007, pg.s 239-241, EBSCO, Accessed 7/6/18
GDI-JV)

Today it is common to assert that geography and identity cannot be equated. Mol and Law claim further that ‘[i]t is no longer
assumed that geography and identity map onto one another. And the resulting complexity – self, other, here, there –
defies the cartographic imagination’ (Mol and Law 2005, 637). Speaking of the geography of racial
distributions the anthropologist Jonathan Marks states that ‘[w]e don’t know how many there are, where to draw
the boundaries between them, or what those boundaries and the people or places they enclose would
represent’ (Marks 1995, 275). And yet if life is a continuously varying diversity, this has not stopped attempts
at such spatial divisions, nor their representation on maps. Today the biological discussion of race
concentrates on those last remaining bits of the genetic code that seem to vary spatially (the gene pool
residual). The case of ‘racialized medicine’ is a good example where race is once again supposedly a useful factor. It is of course possible to
identify race if you want to. Race as a category has been around since the eighteenth century: ‘[p]rior to that time, and even into the
nineteenth century, human variation was always interpreted as varying in local terms’ (Marks 2005, n.p.). Large-scale
‘para-
continental’ groupings were new, and usefully allowed people to think of themselves as civilized
versus others who not only were uncivilized, but were a threat. Foucault calls this other the
‘barbarian’ who exists in a relation to the civilized: ‘[t]he barbarian is always the man who stalks the
frontiers of States, the man who stumbles into the city walls’ (Foucault 2003b, 195). This is the other who
threatens the purity of the race. But the idea of race as natural, large-scale differences is arbitrary . As
Marks adds, ‘[t]he development of the concept of race can profitably be seen as an expression of this so-called
“bio-power” – constituting an authoritative, scientific answer to the basic question, “What kinds of
people are there?”’ (Marks 2005, n.p.). It is in this sense then that racism did not emerge from nationalism,
but from the cut (coupure) into the continuously varying diversity of human variation (see Elden 2002). Maps
provided the spatial imaginary to do this, using race-based data. We have seen how the Inquiry took as its predicate the
derivation of scientific racial boundaries across Europe; boundaries that were assumed to reflect an underlying racial partitioning that could be
discerned on maps. The Inquiry knew well that this was not a simple reduction of identity to space. But they assumed that territory and its
rightful populations could be discerned if you looked hard enough and assembled the right data. Once ‘propaganda’ (‘politics’) had been
removed from the equation, a clear track could be cut through the morass of competing claims. As the Serbian geographer Jovan Cvijic put it in
the pages of the Geographical Review, his ethnic fieldwork allowed him to discern ‘natural barriers’ in Europe which picked out ‘zones of
civilization’. While Cvijic recognized that with trade, migration and communication, people could be ‘dove-tailed’, he argued that each ethnicity
had left ‘a deeper impress than others’ which would allow such zones to be identified (Cvijic 1918, 470). We have seen too that these racial
motivations were in fact mainstream during this period. Davenport and the ERO were happy to work with the Inquiry as part of their larger
scheme to pursue their eugenic principles of biological discrimination. Foucault’s remarks in Discipline and Punish are still descriptive: ‘a
meticulous tactical partitioning in which individual
differentiations were the constricting effects of a power that
multiplied, articulated and subdivided itself’ (Foucault 1977, 198). Hence the need for all those index cards and the focus on
problematic populations in southeastern Europe – Bowman’s ‘storm centre’. How should we understand the turn to Davenport and the ERO, of
Grant’s position on the AGS Council, or of AAG president Robert Ward’s immigration writings? It is at least necessary to know the intellectual
history of race-based mapping in geography. There are two reasons for this. One is that the results of the decisions at Versailles, and
particularly the idea that race could be unambiguously spatialized, would later haunt the twentieth
century. The Balkan conflict of 1991–1995 is only one example. Additionally, we see today, if only in transmuted form,
much of the same discourse applied to immigration questions. The binary division of us-andthem still
has many racial overtones. But perhaps most importantly this episode illustrates that it was not just the work of certain racist men,
nor equally just the result of some spirit of the times. If Foucault is right that biopolitics is characteristic of modern
societies (and it is certainly a sweeping claim) then there is also relevance for us today. Mapping race
is not just something that was an experiment carried out at a certain time and place. Rather, it is part
of an ongoing series of geographical knowledges that allow the biopolitics of the population to be
known en mass in its territories.

Biopolitics introduces a break into the biological continuum of being—this is the

essence of racism
Milchman and Rosenberg 2005 [Alan & Alan, “Michel Foucault: Crises and Problemizations”, The
Review of Politics, Volume 67, p. 340]

But, according to Foucault, what is it that constitutes a group within the populations as a “race?”. Race
is a “way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under power’s control: the break
between what must live and what must die” (p. 254). The basis for such a break in the biological
continuum can be ethnic or religious; it can be founded on sexual orientation, on deviance from a
society’s norms, on mental or physical illness, or on criminality. Any such “cut” in the continuity of the
species can constitute a race in Foucauldian terms, so long as the “identity” in question is metaphysically
defined, attributed to the very being of the individual or group. Moreover, the constitution of race
entails” … the hierarchy of races, the fact that certain races are described as good and that others, in
contrast, are described as good and that others, in contrast, are described as inferior: all this is a way
of fragmenting the field of the biological that power controls … It is, in short, a way of establishing a
biological-type caesura within a population that appears in the biological domain” (p. 255). And on the
bases of such a caesura, the exclusion or elimination of the inferior race can be undertaken,
purportedly in the interests of the life and health of the superior race, those who are normal. Race,
for Foucault, is linked to the “dividing practices” through which a population can be regulated and
controlled in a bio-political regime. The Foucauldian notion of race is a novel one, permitting us to see
the numerous ways in which such dividing practices are instantiated in the modern world, as so many
manifestations of a racialization of politics, even where there is no necessary genetic basis for the
invidious distinctions that it entails.

Biopolitics necessitates racism—it needs a “biological” metric against which to

instrumentalize life.
Stoler 1995 [Ana L., Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial
Order of Things, p. 6-8]
While we might comfortably concur with Foucault that a discourse of sexuality was incited and
activated as an instrument of power in the nineteenth century, we might still raise a basic question: a
discourse about whom? His answer is clear: it was a discourse that produced four "objects of
knowledge that were also targets and anchorage points of the ventures of knowledge" (HS:105), with
specific technologies around them: the masturbating child of the bourgeois family, the "hysterical
woman," the Malthusian couple, and the perverse adult. But students of empire would surely add at
least one more. Did any of these figures exist as objects of knowledge and discourse in the nineteenth
century without a racially erotic counterpoint, without reference to the libidinal energies of the savage,
the primitive, the colonized -- reference points of difference, critique, and desire? At one level, these are
clearly contrapuntal as well as indexical referents, serving to bolster Europe's bourgeois society and to
underscore what might befall it in moral decline. But they were not that alone. The sexual discourse of
empire and of the biopolitic state in Europe were mutually constitutive: their "targets" were broadly
imperial, their regimes of power synthetically bound. My rereading of The History of Sexuality thus rests
on two basic contentions, central to much recent work in colonial studies. First, that Europe's
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century discourses on sexuality, like other cultural, political, or economic
assertions, cannot be charted in Europe alone. In short-circuiting empire, Foucault's history of European
sexuality misses key sites in the production of that discourse, discounts the practices that racialized
bodies, and thus elides a field of knowledge that provided the contrasts for what a "healthy, vigorous,
bourgeois body" was all about. Europe's eighteenth-century discourses on sexuality can -- indeed must
-- be traced along a more circuitous imperial route that leads to nineteenth-century technologies of sex.
They were refracted through the discourses of empire and its exigencies, by men and women whose
affirmations of a bourgeois self, and the racialized contexts in which those confidences were built, could
not be disentangled. I thus approach The History of Sexuality through several venues by comparing its
chronologies and strategic ruptures to those in the colonies and by looking at these inflections on a
racially charged ground. But, as importantly, I argue that a "comparison" between these two seemingly
dispersed technologies of sex in colony and in metropole may miss the extent to which these
technologies were bound. My second contention is that the racial obsessions and refractions of imperial
discourses on sexuality have not been restricted to bourgeois culture in the colonies alone. By bringing
the discursive anxieties and practical struggles over citizenship and national identities in the nineteenth
century back more squarely within Foucault's frame, bourgeois identities in both metropole and
colony emerge tacitly and emphatically coded by race. Discourses of sexuality do more than define
the distinctions of the bourgeois self; in identifying marginal members of the body politic, they have
mapped the moral parameters of European nations. These deeply sedimented discourses on sexual
morality could redraw the "interior frontiers" of national communities, frontiers that were secured
through – and sometimes in collision with -- the boundaries of race. These nationalist discourses were
predicated on exclusionary cultural principles that did more than divide the middle class from the
poor. They marked out those whose claims to property rights, citizenship, and public relief were
worthy of recognition and whose were not. Nationalist discourse drew on and gave force to a wider
politics of exclusion. This version was not concerned solely with the visual markers of difference, but
with the relationship between visible characteristics and invisible properties, outer form and inner
essence. Assessment of these untraceable identity markers could seal economic, political, and social
fates. Imperial discourses that divided colonizer from colonized, metropolitan observers from colonial
agents, and bourgeois colonizers from their subaltern compatriots designated certain cultural
competencies, sexual proclivities, psychological dispositions, and cultivated habits. These in turn
defined the hidden fault lines -- both fixed and fluid -- along which gendered assessments of class and
racial membership were drawn. Within the lexicon of bourgeois civility, self-control, self-discipline, and
self-determination were defining features of bourgeois selves in the colonies. These features, affirmed in
the ideal family milieu, were often transgressed by sexual, moral, and racial contaminations in those
same European colonial homes. Repression was clearly part of this story, but as Foucault argues, it was
subsumed by something more. These discourses on self-mastery were productive of racial distinctions,
of clarified notions of "whiteness" and what it meant to be truly European. These discourses provided
the working categories in which an imperial division of labor was clarified, legitimated, and -- when
under threat -- restored.
 Totalitarianism
Democracy doesn’t prevent totalitarianism—citizenship is founded on the primacy of
bare life which collapses into a zone of indistinction
Agamben 98 [Giorgio, prof of philosophy at university of Verona, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and
Bare Life, pg. 121-123]

The contiguity between mass democracy and totalitarian states, nevertheless, does not have the form
of a sudden transformation (as Lewith, here following in Schmitt’s footsteps, seems to maintain); before
impetuously coming to light in our century the river of biopolitics that gave homo sacer his life runs its
course in a hidden but continuous fashion. It is almost as if, starting from a certain point, every decisive
political event were double-sided: the spaces, the liberties, and the rights won by individuals in their
conflicts with central powers always simultaneously prepared a tacit but increasing inscription of
individuals’ lives within the state order, thus offering a new and more dreadful foundation for the
very sovereign power from which they wanted to liberate themselves. “The ‘right’ to life,” writes
Foucault, explaining the importance assumed by sex as a political issue, “to one’s body, to health, to
happiness, to the satisfaction of needs and, beyond all the oppressions or ‘alienation,’ the ‘right’ to
rediscover what one is and all that one can be, this ‘right’—which the classical juridical system was
utterly incapable of comprehending—was the political response to all these new procedures of power”
(La volontt’, p. 191). The fact is that one and the same affirmation of bare life leads, in bourgeois
democracy, to a primacy of the private over the public and of individual liberties over collective
obligations and yet becomes, in totalitarian states, the decisive political criterion and the exemplary
realm of sovereign decisions. And only because biological life and its needs had become the politically
decisive fact is it possible to understand the otherwise incomprehensible rapidity with which twentieth-
century parliamentary democracies were able to turn into totalitarian states and with which this
century’s totalitarian states were able to be converted, almost without interruption, into
parliamentary democracies. In both cases, these transformations were produced in a context in which
for quite some time politics had already turned into biopolitics, and in which the only real question to
be decided was which form of organization would be best suited to the task of assuring the care,
control, and use of bare life. Once their fundamental referent becomes bare life, traditional political
distinctions (such as those between Right and Left, liberal ism and totalitarianism, private and public)
lose their clarity and intelligibility and enter into a zone of indistinction. The ex-communist ruling
classes’ unexpected fall into the most extreme racism (as in the Serbian program of “ethnic cleansing”)
and the rebirth of new forms of fascism in Europe also have their roots here. Along with the
emergence of biopolitics, we can observe a displacement and gradual expansion beyond the limits of
the decision on bare life, in the state of exception, in which sovereignty consisted. If there is a line in
every modern state marking the point at which the decision on life becomes a decision on death, and
biopolitics can turn into thanatopolitics, this line no longer appears today as a stable border dividing
two clearly distinct zones. This line is now in motion and gradually moving into areas other than that of
political life, areas in which the sovereign is entering into an ever more intimate symbiosis not only with
the jurist but also with the doctor, the scientist, the expert, and the priest. In the pages that follow, we
shall try to show that certain events that are fundamental for the political history of modernity (such as
the declaration of rights), as well as others that seem instead to represent an incomprehensible
intrusion of biologico-scientific principles into the political order (such as National Socialist eugenics
and its elimination of “life that is unworthy of being lived,” or the contemporary debate on the
normative determination of death criteria), acquire their true sense only if they are brought back to the
common biopolitical (or thanatopolitical) context to which they belong. From this perspective, the
camp—as the pure, absolute, and impassable biopolitical space (insofar as it is founded solely on the
state of exception)—will appear as the hidden paradigm of the political space of modernity whose
metamorphoses and disguises we will have to learn to recognize.

Liberalism always contains the possibility of non-liberal interventions in the lives of

those who do not possess the attributes required to be a citizen.
Hoffmann 2007 [Kasper, International Development Studies at Roskilde University, May, Militarised
Bodies and Spirits of Resistance, http://diggy.ruc.dk:8080/handle/1800/2766]

In modern forms of government, concepts of the norm and normal have played a kind mediating role in
the formulation and execution of normative projects (Canguilhem 2005 [1966]; Ewald 1990). It is
through the systematic accumulation of knowledge about certain social problems and deviations that
we come to know the normal and the norm that stabilise and indicate it in social contexts (Ewald
1990: 140). By aligning delinquent or abnormal subjectivities (through, for instance, techniques of
pedagogy, health, economic development, human development, spirituality etc.) to the norm, the
normal order, can be restored allowing normative goals to be considered “for the good”: “[T]he good
is figured in terms of adequacy – the good product is adequate to the purpose it was meant to serve.
Within the normative system, values are not defined a priori, but instead through an endless process
of comparison and normalization” (Ewald 1990: 152). Rose has made the point that the “very notion of
normality has emerged out of a concern with types of conduct, thought, expression deemed
troublesome or dangerous” (Rose 1996: 26), so that normality can only be understood in relation to the
abnormal. Therefore, even if the norm has allowed modern biopower to transform negative restraints
of power into more positive controls or normalisation, it is still producing dangerous subjectivities.
Within liberal forms of government, at least, there is a long history of people who, for one reason or
another, are deemed not to possess or to display the attributes (e.g. autonomy, responsibility)
required of the juridical and political subjects of rights and who are therefore subjected to all sorts of
disciplinary, bio-political and even sovereign interventions. (Dean 1999: 134) The list of those so
subjected would include at various times those furnished with the status of the indigent, the
degenerate, the feeble-minded, the native, the savage, the homosexual, the delinquent, the dangerous
etc. Modern so-called “liberal” practices of government therefore also entail ‘illiberal’ aspects (see
Hindess 2001; Dean 1999 Chapter 7). Liberalism always contains the possibility of non-liberal
interventions in the lives of those who do not possess the attributes required to be a “citizen”.
However, bio-politics is not confined to liberal forms of rule: liberalism just makes the articulation in a
specific way. Other types of rule, such as authoritarian or totalitarian forms, also depend on the
elements of a bio-politics that is concerned with the detailed administration of life. Rather than
denying that non-liberal practices are indeed an integral part of all forms of liberal democratic
government, we could see the will to establish the authority of liberal democracy – this will to power –
as an element of sovereignty in the heart of the “democracy”. In modern processes of government, the
focus is on the fostering and promotion of life, though in certain circumstances this fundamental
“security” of the population is experienced as threatened. In such circumstances the community calls
upon its fundamental right to exist as such and thus evokes its right to deny the right to life of those
who are seen as a threat to the life of that same population. This allows us to consider what might be
thought of as the dark side of bio-politics (Dean 1999: 139). In Foucault’s account, bio-politics, as
concrete political method of security, does not put an end to the practice of war; it provides it with
renewed scope. This new scope allows the actual neutralization, or even elimination of life at the level
of entire populations, or micro populations. It intensifies the killing, whether by “ethnic cleansing” that
visits holocausts upon whole groups or by the mass slaughter of classes and groups in the name of the
utopia to be achieved. Governance is now exercised at the level of life and of the population, and
wars will be waged at that level on behalf of the “security” of each and all. This brings us to the heart
of Foucault’s challenging thesis about bio-politics, namely that there is an intimate connection between
the exercise of a life-administering power and the commission of genocide: “If genocide is indeed the
dream of modern powers […] it is because power is located at the level of life, the species, the race,
and the large-scale phenomena of population” (Foucault 1976: 180, my translation). Thus, there seems
to be a kind of inescapable connection between the power to foster life and the power to disqualify
life which is characteristic of bio-power. The emergence of a bio-political racism in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries can be approached as a trajectory in which the demand for a homogenous social
space articulated by the norm appears to turn into a life necessity. Through the establishment of the
norm, abnormality is inscribed upon individual “other” bodies, casting certain deviations as both
internal dangers to the body politic and as inheritable legacies that threatens the well-being of race:
On behalf of the existence of everyone entire populations are mobilised for the purpose of wholesale
slaughter in the name of the life necessity: massacres have become vital. It is as managers of life and
survival, of bodies and the race, that so many regimes have been able to wage so many wars, causing
so many men to be killed…at stake is the biological existence of a population. (Foucault 1976: 180, my
translation, emphasis) Bio-politics presides over the processes of birth, death, production and illness. It
acts on the human species. Within this bio-political practice the sovereign right to kill appears in a
new form; as an “excess” of biopower that does away with life in the name of securing it, and in its
most radical form it is a means of introducing a fundamental distinction between those who must live
and those who must die. It fragments the biological field and establishes a break within the biological
continuum of human beings by defining a hierarchy of races, a set of subdivisions in which certain
races are classified as “good”, fit and superior (Stoler 1995: 84). It therefore establishes a positive
relation between the right to kill and the assurance of life. It posits that, the more you kill and let die,
the more you will live. Thus, in modern biopolitical practice, war does more than reinforce one’s own
kind by eliminating a racial adversary: it “regenerates” one’s own race (Stoler 1995: 56). It is essential
to note that racism as a bio-political practice does not draw on a particular theory of race – it does not
need to. Instead racism designates a much more general practice which introduces a rift in the
biological continuum that is the human species between those who are worthy of citizenship and
those who are not. Internal threats to the health and wellbeing of a social body come from those who
were deemed to lack an ethics of “how to live” and thus the ability to govern themselves. It is worth
remembering that the Nazi concentration camps housed not only Jews, but also Gypsies,
homosexuals, Bolsheviks and other inassimilable elements. To sum up, Foucault understands racism
as a sort of permanent feature of biopower and not as the paroxysmal convulsion of a decaying moral
order (Stoler, 1995: 64). Foucault’s argument is that racism is not only confined within those obviously
racist forms of authoritarian government such as the German Nationalist Socialist state, but that it is
intrinsic to the nature of all modern, normalising governmental rationalities and their bio-political
technologies. By showing how racism possesses a polyvalent mobility, he shows that racism is not
merely an ideological discourse of exceptionally cruel regimes, but a fundamental feature of modern
processes of government.
 Neoliberal Governmentality
Neoliberal governmentality is fascism
Sparke, Professor in the Politics Department at UC Santa Cruz, 2006 [M.B., ‘A Neoliberal Nexus:
Economy, Security and the Biopolitics of Citizenship on the Border’, Political Geography 25(2), pp. 151-
180 GDI – JM]

Neoliberalism as a regime of governance is easy enough to describe in the abstract. Ideologically it is

organized around the twin ideas of liberalizing the capitalist market from state control and
refashioning state practices in the idealized image of the free market. At the macro-scale of
government policy these ideas have inspired and informed the promotion and entrenchment of the
now familiar neoliberal approach to governance that includes free trade, privatization, financial
deregulation, monetarism, fiscal austerity, welfare reform, and, the punitive policing of the poor. At
the level of the more micro practices that Foucault's followers have called governmentality (see
Burchell et al 1991), neoliberalism is also commonly associated with the remaking of state regulation
through the market-based mentalities and techniques associated with audits, performance
assessments, benchmarking, risk ratings, and, at a still more personal level, the educational and cultural
cultivation of a new kind of self-promoting and self-policing entrepreneurial individualism. Whether
macro or micro, all these innovations in governmental policy and practice represent transformed
patterns of state-making and rule. Even in the abstract, therefore, it is clear that, despite the common-
sense cant about 'deregulation' in neoliberal rhetoric, neoliberalism leads in practice to re-regulation.
However, when such context contingent neoliberal reregulations are examined in detail, the
contradictions and resulting theoretical complications expand exponentially (Sparke, forthcoming).
Examined in historical and geographical context, neoliberalism represents an extraordinarily messy mix
of ideas and practices that have been developed and deployed in different ways with different names
in different places (Larner, 2000; Mitchell, 2004). While the ideas go back to Smith and Ricardo, their
reactivation as neoliberalism is connected to the late twentieth century rejection of Keynesian
liberalism. This rejection had been persistently demanded through the 1940s, 50s and 60s by critics of
state control such as Friederich von Hayek and Milton Friedman. However, it only came to be
implemented as policy in the aftermath of the economic crises of the 1970s when politicians such as
Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan came to power promising the roll-back of state control over
capitalism. At the time of the Thatcherite and Reaganite revolutions, however, their national critics
tended to talk not about neoliberalism but rather about a 'New Right', or about 'Thatcherism',
'Reaganism' and their much touted but generally flouted commitments to 'fiscal conservativism'. Only
retroactively have Thatcher and Reagan been reviewed as revolutionaries of neoliberalism per se.
During the 1970s and 1980s it was instead more commonly critics in the Global South, most especially in
Latin America, who were early to use neoliberalism to critique externally imposed but internally
reproduced market-based governance (Adelman and Centemo, forthcoming). This is worth
remembering because the Latin American experience also reminds us that neoliberalism frequently
had an authoritarian underbelly. This does not mean that neoliberalism is always and everywhere
connected to the sorts of coercive political violence that cast out the socialists and brought Pinochet
and his Chicago trained economists to power in Chile (Valdés, 1995). Nor does it mean that it is all about
the eclipse of national citizenship by the structural adjustment imperatives of transnational finance.
However, the Latin American lessons do clearly suggest that we should approach any examination of
neoliberal governance with a sensitivity to its contradictions, to its subordination of national
citizenship, and to the casting out from the neoliberal nation-state of sundry others deemed unworthy
of civil rights (see also Hart, forthcoming).

Neoliberalism warps traditional liberal values and transforms people into monetary
objects
Sparke, Professor in the Politics Department at UC Santa Cruz, 2006 [M.B., ‘A Neoliberal Nexus:
Economy, Security and the Biopolitics of Citizenship on the Border’, Political Geography 25(2), pp. 151-
180 GDI – JM]

The historical trajectory and the transferability of Marshall's narrative to other contexts are
questionable, as too is the adequacy of his triptych of citizenship in light of feminist and postcolonial
critiques of the normative white western man of property that stands at the center of most modern
formulations of liberal citizenship (Fraser and Gordon, 1998; Kofman, 2003; Marston, 1994; and Mehta,
2000). However, as Sallie Marston and Katharyne Mitchell have argued, Marshall's attention to how
eighteenth century civil citizenship was associated with the liberal repudiation of interventionist
government helps explain how a certain sort of retreat to civil citizenship is now coincident with the
entrenchment of neoliberal policies (Marston and Mitchell, 2004). This is the retreat marked by the
erosion of social citizenship through the roll- back of the welfare state and the rolling out of what
Jamie Peck calls 'workfare states' (Peck 2001, 2004). It is also a retreat characterized by the demise of
political citizenship through the privatization of the public sphere, the increasing intrusion of money into
politics, and the legal restriction of political debate to various oxymoronic 'protest zones', 'free speech
zones' and what Don Mitchell, examining the re-imagination of public space in recent US court decisions,
critiques as the privatized bubble spaces of an atomized 'SUV citizenship' (Mitchell, 2005). But as such
the retreat has not been back to a static, nationally-fixed form of civil citizenship based on property
and mobility rights merely within the nation-state. SUV citizenship has instead been twinned
transnationally with the development of the frequent flyer 'Gold clubs', 'Platinum elites', 'Red Carpet
communities' and even with what might be dubbed the 'Gulfstream citizenship' of today's hyper-mobile
business class (Adey, forthcoming). Faced with developments like these - including expedited border-
crossing innovations such as NEXUS - we need to consider how neoliberal government practices, both
macro and micro, have been busily rescaling civil citizenship in transnational ways. At the macro-level of
inter-government agreements and policies, neoliberal governance is creating what the Gramscian
theorist Stephen Gill calls a 'market civilization' (Gill, 2003: 116 - 142). In Gill's analysis this needs to be
conceptualized as a quasi-constitutional process that is creating through agreements such as NAFTA
wholly new rights for the class core of today's hegemonic bloc: the transnational business class. This
transnational class which organizes itself through elite gatherings such as the G7, OECD, and annual
Davos meetings is, according to Gill, entrenching for itself all sorts of new oligopolistic privileges while
imposing market discipline on the poor and weak (see also Lapham, 1998). Amongst the privileges
with which Gill is most concerned are the "privileged rights of citizenship and representation" (2003:
132) conferred on corporations through the protections secured by international trade agreements and
the more hidden hands of the financial markets. Yet, alongside this 'new constitutionalism' for capital,
Gill also gestures towards developments such as gated communities in order to point up the more
personal implications of neoliberal citizenship for entrepreneurial individuals. Other theorists who have
focused directly on the transnational business class subjects have in turn fleshed out how this market-
mediated remaking of citizenship relates to personal rights at a more micro level of governmentality
(e.g. Mitchell, 2004; Olds and Thrift, 2005; Ong, 1999). And, in a different way, Leslie Sklair's (2001) work
on the transnational capitalist class of business elites highlights the seemingly unbounded global
visions of belonging (including rights to move and belong in societies all over the planet as well as the
rights to amass and control belongings globally) that animate corporate discourse (see also Sparke,
2003 and 2005). It is precisely this combination of abilities and attitudes associated with transnational
corporate mobility that underpins what I am describing here as the transnational rescaling of civil
citizenship. Through a whole set of governmental practices - from the formal and most obvious acts of
remaking national law in accordance with transnational trade law (Wallach and Woodall, 2004) to the
most informal and often unnoticed developments in education and popular culture (Roberts, 2004, Hillis
et al, 2001) - we are witnessing an emergence, albeit an extremely uneven emergence, of a new kind of
transnationally envisioned, transnationally protected and transnationally mobile citizen-subject.
However, the big challenge for scholars - not to mention for transnational business class entrepreneurs
themselves - involves coming to terms with how such transnational transformations of citizenship are
worked out on the ground in the context of all sorts of countervailing imperatives, including not least
of all the sorts of intensified border securitization we have seen in North America in the aftermath of
9/11.
 Environment – Social Ecology
US-Mexico borderlands occupy a site for violence, destroying migrant rights and labor
power and fueling a dehumanizing image of Mexicans as dirty and diseased
Sackman, Professor of History at the University of Puget Sound, 2014 (Douglas, “Trafficking Nature
and Labor Across Borders: The Transnational Return of US Environmental History,” International Labor
and Working Class History; Cambridge, Vol. 85, Spring, Proquest, Accessed 7/9/18 GDI-GN)

Beginning in 1915, an eerily similar prophylactic biological filter was applied to human border crossers. In Eugenic Nation, Alexandra
Stern covers the creation, implementation, and social and political ramifications of a border
quarantine ostensibly designed to prevent an influx of typhus. Mexican border crossers were subjected to
disinfection baths and their baggage was fumigated, rituals that transformed "the boundary line into a
construct verified and enacted upon the body itself." The quarantine, a manifestation of the
biopolitics of the border, expressed and furthered the stereotype of Mexicans as dirty and diseased,
transforming the border crossing into an "unforgettable passage into the strict racial order of the
United States." 38Many of the people subjected to these treatments were on their way to work picking crops in pesticide-treated
fields, and they experienced them as biochemical baptisms designed not to renew them in the eyes of a
higher power but to dehumanize them at the behest of US authority. In Migrant Imaginaries (2008), Alicia Camacho uses
migrant narratives to explore how the US-Mexico borderlands have been made into a zone of violence
and an arena for stripping people of both rights and labor power. She quotes migrants who assert
their humanity despite economic and political structures of alienation by proclaiming "De la tierra somos, no
somos ilegales [We are of the earth, we are not illegal]." Pointing to the hundreds of women killed around the maquiladoras of
Ciudad Juárez and the thousands who are missing and who have been lost in the desert crossings since 1990, Camacho claims that
"this violence is not aberrant but central to the current regime of capitalist growth and unequal
development. The Mexico-U.S. border is a critical locus for the transnational circuits that form the
global political economy and its neoliberal governance ." Materially grounded in the working conditions of Mexicans as a
"transborder laboring class," Camacho's work examines those migrants' works of cultural expression as a way of
mapping and hopefully protecting the "fragile social ecology of the transborder space ." 39Meanwhile, the
very technologies of power erected to mark and police the border have concretized in ways that have
harmed both human and nonhuman ecologies . As Rachel St. John explains, "environmentalists and scientists
have criticized the fence as an act of 'environmental vandalism' and have warned that both their
construction and their continuing disruption of borderland ecosystems could threaten endangered
species, including ocelots and Sonoran pronghorns." 40A full ecological history of the US-Mexico
borderlands would encompass the interdynamics of the human and the nonhuman in shaping the
waters and lands of the transborder region. But it would do more as well, for the trafficking of nature and labor through the
borderlands has been critical to larger systems and flows--including the copper extracted from that earth that conducted electricity across
North America and the harvesting of crops in California that ended up on tables in New York or Japan. 41
Alternative
 No Borders
Challenging border regulations isn’t enough, only questioning the implications of
migration on territorial belonging
Bauder, Professor, Dept. of Geography & Environmental Studies at Ryerson University, 2014 (Harald,
“The Possibilities of Open and No Borders,” Social Justice, Vol. 39, No. 4, N.D., JSTOR, Accessed 2/7/18
GDI-GN)

Human mobility is regulated through selective and exclusionary border practices . An important
contribution that critical scholarship can make toward free human mobility is not only to problematize
border regulations and practices but also to offer fresh imaginations of human migration and territorial
belonging. In this article, I examine the imaginations of open borders and no border that would permit the uncon strained migration of
people, and I explore the possibilities associated with these imaginations. International migration is currently controlled not
only at the physical border but also at transit points, airports, and trucking routes before migrants reach the
border, as well as in workplaces, public spaces, and even private homes after the migrants have crossed the border
(Balibar 2002; Coleman 2007; Nevins 2002; Rumford 2008; Vaughan-Williams 2008). Therefore the notion of human mobility I use
here is associated with more than sim ply crossing the physical border line; it also addresses other aspects
of the border, including, for example, the unconstrained mobility of people within a territory after crossing its
border, and the ability to engage in society and the labor market as equal members (Bauder 201 lb). While I
develop an argument for open borders based on the contemporary context of Western liberal-democratic
nation-states with territorial borders, I also contemplate a no-border scenario , which entails the
transformation of the ontologies that underlie contemporary political configurations . The open borders
imagination affirms the territorial nature of political organizations and the existence of territorial
borders. Conversely, no-border advocates would prefer to eliminate borders altogether . In this article, I thus
bring open-borders and no-border literatures into dialogue with each other.
 No Borders Solvency
Pursuing reformist approaches to immigration reinstate the sources of migrant
oppression, only no-borders politics’ detachment from state policy reform can
stimulate new social and political formation of identity
Bauder, Professor, Dept. of Geography & Environmental Studies at Ryerson University, 2014 (Harald,
“The Possibilities of Open and No Borders,” Social Justice, Vol. 39, No. 4, N.D., JSTOR, Accessed 2/7/18
GDI-GN)

The real possible, as I argued above, can be associated with the notion of no border. Bridget Anderson and
her colleagues (2009, 12) claim that no-border politics is "not Utopian. It is in fact eminently practical and is being
carried out daily" (see also Sharma 2003). I concur that no-border politics is "not Utopian"—albeit not only because
this politics is already being carried out but also because no-border politics refrains from articulating
concrete alternatives (i.e., contingent possibilities) typically associated with Utopias (Bauder 2013). I do not believe
that it is necessary or possible to define a no-border world in positive terms; to do so would be a
retreat to the contingently possible, which requires employing existing concepts, structures, and
ontologies. Rather, transformative politics involves the practice of "consciousness-raising" (Pratt and
Rosner 2006,15). In this way, no-border politics follows a long tradition of critical practice , ranging from organizing the
working class in the nineteenth century (Marx and Engels 1846, 1848) to the recent debate on the global intimate (Pratt and Rosner 2006;
Mountz and Hyndman 2006) and the formation of groups like No One Is Illegal (Bauder 2012b). These
politics pursue social and
political transformation by connecting collective action with the formation of new identities through
solidarity. The real possibility of no border stands in dialectical opposition to the contingent possibility
under conditions of national statehood, territorial belonging, and formal citizenship . Thus, by continuing
to affirm the institutions of the territorial nation-state and citizenship, many unions in the United
States and elsewhere have not been able to contribute in meaningful ways to no-border politics
(Anderson et al. 2009). Similarly, migrant movements and advocacy groups that support formal citizenship and
fight for the "integration" of migrants into the body of the nation have been criticized for affirming the very source
of migrant oppression (Bauder 2006a).

No Borders requires moving beyond current configurations of the state, questioning

political subjectification of migrants and refugees, and recognizing the intimate level
of migrant oppression
Bauder, Professor, Dept. of Geography & Environmental Studies at Ryerson University, 2014 (Harald,
“The Possibilities of Open and No Borders,” Social Justice, Vol. 39, No. 4, N.D., JSTOR, Accessed 2/7/18
GDI-GN)

The real-possible society associated with no border will not emerge from academic musings of the
contingently possible, but it will rather involve progressive collective practices enacted by those who
have been excluded from formal and other forms of citizenship, such as the sans-papiers in France, and other groups, such as the
No Border network or No One Is Illegal, that operate in Europe, North America, and elsewhere (e.g., Anderson et al. 2009; Balibar 2000; Wright
2003). Potentially transformative collective practices are enacted , for example, when activists march to
express their solidarity across borders, when non-status migrants who are not supposed to have a voice speak up, and when
detained refugees and migrants "constitute themselves as cultural subjects" by publicly showing their art (Nyers 2010,140). They are also
performed at No Border camps that demonstrate a "relationship to the land" that is not based on
state territory or binaries like citizen vs. alien, national vs. foreigner , etc. (Walters 2006,33). These collective
practices seek to move beyond contemporary material configurations of state , nationhood, and formal
citizenship, and they embody the "potential for novel forms of political subjectification " (Nyers 2010, 137). No-
border politics reject borders, territorial statehood, and nationhood, as well as the constructed
identities of migrant, refugee, and Aboriginal, and they recognize the role these identities play in
oppressing the people they label (Sharma 2003; Sharma and Wright 2008-2009; Wright 2003). Instead, no-border politics
foster solidarity across imposed subject identities and unwanted borders . By rejecting existing structures of
oppression and the violence these structures exercise, the practical politics of no border remain materially grounded in
the conditions of contemporary nation-state formation, territorial citizenship, and global capitalism.
Migration and freedom of mobility are central to these politics (Nyers 2010; Walters 2006). According to Michael
Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000, 213), "desertion and exodus are important forms of class struggle within and against imperial post-modernity."
Human mobility connects and bonds people experiencing oppression at the intimate level,
transcending the imposed scales of the national, global, and local (Mountz and Hyndman 2006). By fostering
solidarity, mobility and migration can evoke a "condition of possibility" (Aradau and Hysmans 2009, 584).
 “I’m Here Already”
The alternative is “I’m here already.” This is an orientation of border thinking that
recentralizes the foreign as the civil and is key to overcoming international
conceptualizations of borders
Gilberto Rosas, Associate Professor of Political Science, Washington University in St Louis, 2007,
“Fragile Ends of War,” Social Text 25 (2 (91)): 81-102. GDI John Melton

Analyses of border militarization largely overlook the Mexican govern- ment’s own amplification of law
enforcement at the international bound- ary in the 1990s. Mexico City formed Grupo Beta, and later
other police forces, for reducing violence in human trafficking in the border region. While working with
the young people of Barrio Libre, I regularly wit- nessed other Mexican authorities arresting what could
be called poten- tial immigrants, typically those who resembled the impoverished sub- jects of Mexico’s
neoliberal turn, the marginals of southern Mexico, who appeared to be about to attempt to cross the
border by irregular means. Complex social relations of race, class, and gender exercised on those
perceived as — and actively constructed as — subordinate generates such policing practices. Such
measures recall Agamben’s intervention con- cerning policing and its relationship to sovereignty. In
the late 1990s and early 2000s, migrant policing in Nogales, Sonora, could be characterized as
haphazard, apparently lacking the systemization and implementation of ongoing border militarization in
the United States. Often, authorities simply yanked migrants off the border fence. In this context, local
police officers appeared emboldened. They began further subjugating the already marginalized and
displaced young people of Barrio Libre. As Gabriel recounted, the authorities came and chased us out of
tourist zones where we used to ask the gringos [U.S. tourists] for money and where we used to wash the
windows on the cars going to the other side. The Fragile Ends of War 89 Victor likewise noted that they
came and started to demand that we get credenciales to wash windows. The crisis-driven displacements
of these young people, many of whom had come to Nogales, Sonora, from throughout Mexico — the
states of Jalisco, Chiapas, Quintana Roo, Sinaloa — made access to the required documentation difficult.
The encounter of Margarita of Barrio Libre with border law enforce- ment foregrounds the complexities
in the heightened policing of Nogales, Sonora. One of Beta put his gun to my head and told me not to
move because he was going to shoot. Negro ran . . . took me outside . . . the Beta was going to hit me,
and I told him, if your going to hit me, don’t hit me on my stomach because I’m pregnant . . . he then
handcuffed me and took me to the office. There they told me they were going to send me to the
correcional [youth detention facility] in Hermosillo. He asked me, if I send you to the correcional, will
you stop? I told him. . . . Send me. . . . I’m here already . . . there’s nothing I can do about it. (My
emphasis) Her statement “I’m here already” captures the density of coercive state power in her life
and in other young people’s lives at this moment in Nogales, Sonora. Others of the Barrio Libre could
tell me the names and personalities of agents in Grupo Beta of Nogales, Sonora, and of agents in the
Border Patrol. Yet, the young woman’s deft and defiant working of gender dynamics points to the
reversibility or fragility of contemporary power relations. She, as well as others, of the Barrio Libre
continued with their subterranean border crossings a short time later. Sovereignty, compromised as it
is in the Mexican borderlands, cannot easily be forged, and in the fragilities of Mexican and U.S.
sovereignty at the border, the young people’s formation of Barrio Libre took root.
 Refuse Borders/“Life”
Reject the politics of absolute enclosure—when faced with the depoliticization of
border management, the only way to checking the production of bare life is to give up
hope of controlling the material constitution of the species.
Ajana 2006 [Btihaj, “Immigration Interrupted,” Journal for Cultural Research, 10.3]
Thus far, we have seen how the figurations of immanentist politics are manifested through immigration
controls by means of spatialising, technologising and articulating absolute figures within the political
imaginary, giving rise to modes of inclusion and exclusion. Such figurations are problematic insofar as
they are deeply ensconced within the determinism of sovereignty in which identity, citizenship, and
belonging are reduced to and burdened by the illusive belief in a fixed common substance and a need to
sustain a state of self-enclosure. To follow the thread of Nancy’s assertions, it can be argued that what
makes these figurations rather problematic is, in fact, their failure to address or at least recognise the
question of what constitutes ‘being-in-common’ and their continuous attempt to conceal the
inevitability of ‘being-with’, notions that are salient in rethinking the question of immigration. Instead
of regarding being-in-common as the gathering together of individuals who share some common
property or essence –and in which the clinamen is removed from such gathering, Nancy (1991, p. 26–7)
offers an alternative understanding of this concept. He asserts that being-in-common is first and
foremost being exposed to alterity through a relationship of sharing, made possible by the
Heideggerian notion of being-with (Mitsein) which goes beyond commonality and identity politics. Such
an understanding, albeit abstract due to its breaking away from any spatial particularity, does indeed
save individuals or rather singularities from the danger of communal fusion (witnessed for instance in
the movements of fascism and Nazism) and the restraints of self-enclosure (immigration controls for
instance). For in Nancy’s conceptualisation, singular beings are not regarded as absolute figures of
immanentist politics (i.e. citizens) but as beings whose experience of being-in-common is constituted
through their predicate-free existential/ ontological position of being-there (Dasein) and what they
reveal to each other in their exteriority (which forms their interiority) and their multiplicity (which forms
their uniqueness). The being-such of a singular being is irreducibly a beingwith that draws its sense of
‘selfness’ from the existence of ‘otherness’ without, however, having to live up to a differentiating
identity or a shared individuality 266 AJANA that would place it within the confines of categorisation i.e.
suchness: ‘such-andsuch being is reclaimed from its having this or that property … (the reds, the French,
the Muslims)’ (Agamben 1993, p. 1). Thus, the realisation or rather actualisation of being-in-common is
only possible insofar as singular beings are ‘whatever’ (ibid.) beings (not having any particular identity)
whose ‘membership’ could not be determined by or reduced to having/sharing ‘common’
characteristics. But a membership that can only be experienced at the moment of exposure to
singularity, at the moment of its ‘taking place’ ‘…(which is itself without a place, without a space
reserved for or devoted to its presence)’ (Nancy 1991, p. 72). Exposure, sharing and being-with are
thus constitutive of being-in-common in such a way that belonging itself becomes a ‘bare’ belonging
stripped from any predetermined condition of membership (Agamben 1993, p. 84) or demarcated
territoriality. It is a belonging where ‘whatever’ (singularity such as it is – and this ‘such’ is unidentifiable
and fluid) belongs to ‘whateverness’ (unconditional being-in-common). Immigration, in this sense, can
be regarded as an aspect of exposure, sharing and being-with, to which there could/should be no fixed
limit or neat bordering. But while it might be objected that this conceptualisation of ‘being-in-
common’ is devoid of any concrete ‘sense’ of political engagement or agency, it is, nevertheless,
important to attend to the way in which such conceptualisation sets the stage for the tensions
inherent in the thinking of hospitality, which renders immigration not only a political question but
also an ethical one. For when the issue of immigration is contemplated from an ethical standpoint, it
becomes possible to reveal not only the failure but also the ‘violence’ embedded within Western politics
(Metselaar 2003, p. 1). This political violence is epitomised in the policies of detention, the treatment
of refugees, the proposal of asylum quotas, the forced integration, or even, the act of ‘naming’ (‘illegal
immigrant’, ‘asylum seeker’, ‘refugee’, ‘bogus’, ‘detainee’, ‘deportee’, etc.), all of which breach the
ethics of radical generosity toward otherness – in that ‘violence does not consist so much in injuring
and annihilating persons as in interrupting their continuity, making them play roles in which they no
longer recognize themselves’ (Levinas 1969, p. 21). It is, hence, the call for ethics that puts the
question of politics into doubt and reconfigures the understanding of responsibility ‘for the Other’
(Levinas 1982, p. 95), for the ‘Stranger who disturbs the being at home with oneself’ (Levinas 1969, p.
39)4.

We should reject the notion that “we” can control who “we” are.
Ajana 2006 [Btihaj, “Immigration Interrupted,” Journal for Cultural Research, 10.3]
Although it is often argued that Levinas as well as Derrida’s unconditional hospitability cannot be
unproblematically (or even possibly) translated into a political action (Metselaar 2003, p. 9) insofar as it
is merely articulated at the level of the dual self-Other relationship rather than sociality as a whole (this
being particularly true of Levinasian ethics), their vision is, nonetheless, salient in terms of provoking a
radical transformation in social and political imaginaries and invoking the exigency of a ‘politics of
generosity that would foster rather than close off different ways of being’ (Diprose 2002, p. 172). Such
politics will not proceed from ‘a hermeneutics of depth’ (Rose 1999, p. 196) in which subjectivity is
wrought around self-containment, self-sufficiency and self-determinacy, presented as a project to be
accomplished. Instead, it might find its point of departure in the potential encounter with the other
and the total exposure to embodied alterity. For it is the experience of encountering and being-
exposed-to that infuses the crisis ‘into the hyphen at the heart of the nation-state’ (Coward 1999, p.
12) and undoes any immanentist attempt to essentialise identity, commonality and belonging. Whilst
it is unclear as to how such an ethico-political vision may be put into practice (perhaps this ‘not-
knowing-how’ would save this alternative vision from being turned into yet another figure of
immanentism), it may be that the rejection, transgression and obliteration of immigration controls are
to be regarded as the touchstone of this radical ethico-politics and an epitome of the necessary shift
from politics of borders to politics of singularities where ‘No One Is Illegal’ (Cohen 2003).

We must give up on the notion that there is a fundamental (read: instrumental)

relationship between bare life and politics in order to let life exist in its own.
Wall 2005 [Thomas Carl, professor of English at national tapai university, Andrew Norris, assistant
professor of political science at the university of Pennsylvania, editor, Politics, Metaphysics, and Death:
Essays On Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer, pg. 38-39]

Agamben’s advance on these analyses is as follows: between unqualified, bare life and its
communities, its ways of life, there exists no fundamental relation and there never has. This missing
link is what the West is running up against again and again in its perpetual crises: the production of
the biopolitical body always also secretes bare life, which remains as a proximity and an exception to
any form of life (or death). Between bare life and the ways in which it is lived, there is an always
disappearing distinction, which runs pell mell throughout life itself, fracturing the organism into a
mosaic or melanae. The disappearance of this distinction is biopolitical inspiration. This is what law
and sovereign power have always been about, this has always been their secret ambition: to make of
that inspiration a separation and a relation. Homo Sacer is the history of that secret. Between bare life
and its ways of living, there can only be decision. Every sovereign and every state has always confronted
this. Whether the sovereign takes power, arranges power, or is given power, it always sees before it a
magma of anchored life. Power sees before it life that is already no longer natural but not yet properly
the life of a people, a state. And this is why, in the last analysis, political power must absorb death, for
death—the right to death (and, for now, this is not about euthanasia, but about the decision as to what
counts as death and when and in what way death counts as death and not simply perishing, which is to
say, ~ death, and thus the life it most intimately articulates, count at all)—is the ontological decision
whereby the living being can remain possible unto its own-most self Bare life owns only itself, can be
only itself, in owning the estranged intimacy of its to-death. Estranged and intimate because death
names only that which it suspends. But if God can be killed, why not death? Does it not follow with
perfect rigor that the death of God should be the death of death, the disappearance of death as an
event? Why should death not simply be a political strategy, a public health issue, a medico-technical
accident, an unceremonious being-killed and, at the same time and by the same logic, an
unceremonious being-kept-alive by any means necessary? (It is known, for example, that a deportee ill
with influenza would be allowed to recover before being transported to a death camp.) Indeed, the
uncanny relation of being to death as delineated by Heidegger (where the possibility of not being there
anymore opens decisively the already-being-there that the existent is at its own most) is, at the same
time, a primordial nonrelation, nonconnection of bare life to death. Bare life is thrust, excepted, or
even driven, outside the to-death that defines Dasein and that transforms bare life into being. Falling
outside Sein-zum-Tode is bare life au hasard in the space of the political. In our era in which the
furious and totalizing will-to-identity is driven by the anxiety and shame of nihilism, and in which
resistance to totality is driven only by “alternative” identities (or “lifestyles” or “communities”), the
absence of any determinate or destinal relation to bare life will perpetually, exigently, and internally
de-structure every form of relation from makeshift anarchist collectives to fascist ethnocities. Bare life
is the nonrelational and thus invites decision. It is the very space of decision (political and ontologi cal)
and, as such, is perpetually au hasard. If we are to think the political again, and not vainly try to rid
ourselves of the political in favor of who knows what theofundamentalist human nature or
cosmosophical evolution, we must, Agamben argues, begin to do this by thinking bios without
relation to zoe. We must think that it is the essence of bios to exist in its own zoe, its own simplicity
and singularity, and this rethinking begins with analysis of the ban.
 “Rethink” Borders – Ontology Key
The role of the ballot should be to decide who has the best relationship to the border.
Our relationship problematizes ontological assumptions about the reality of the
border, but their relationship assumes the naturalness of the border as a line.
Anssi Paasi, Academy of Finland, 1-1-2012, "Border Studies Reanimated: Going beyond the
Territorial/Relational Divide," Environment and Planning A, Volume 44
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1068/a45282 - GDI John Melton

Academic keywords are characteristically contested, and even the most vibrant examples defy static
definitions. Political geographer Prescott (1987) defined the terminology of border studies
straightforwardly: boundary was the abstract line that separates state territories, frontier was a zone
category, and borders were areas adjacent to a territory. Such characterizations were problematic in
their blunt state-centrism and in anchoring the language of border studies to definite “artefacts on
the ground” (Agnew, 2008). Consequently, boundaries were seen as dividers, edges of power
containers that, after being established, were relatively stable, and were often glorified as ‘holy’ entities
in state ideologies. Prescott’s three terms are used more or less synonymously today and the ‘border’
has gradually become the dominant keyword. Current interdisciplinary research on borders varies both
thematically and in its theoretical, methodological and empirical orientation (Johnson et al, 2011; Wastl-
Walter, 2011; Wilson and Donnan, 2012). Theoretical issues are occasionally raised explicitly by
researchers (Bauder, 2011; Brunett-Jailly, 2011), but border more often seems to be a sort of ‘side-term’
that resonates only implicitly when scholars scrutinize topics related, for example, to security,
population, and circulation (immigration, refugees) or to cultural themes (multiculturalism, cultural
hybridity) (Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero, 2008; Wastl-Walter 2011; Wilson and Donnan, 2012). More often
than not, researchers stress the need to problematize the ‘flows of life’ across borders and how such
flows are managed and governed at and across various scales, from human bodies to the global.
Likewise, the assumptions related to borders—their power and functions, and the agencies impacting on
borders and bordering—are multiple. Contrary to tradition, borders are now rarely conceptualized as
separate sociospatial entities. Further, rather than permanent elements, borders are seen as
historically contingent institutions that are constituted in and constitutive of the perpetual production
and reproduction of territories. The inseparability of borders and territories does not imply that they
should form fixed bounded wholes, but rather that they are dispersed sets of power relations that are
mobilized for various purposes. One important step has been the abandonment of the view of borders
as mere lines and the notion of their location solely at the ‘edges’ of spaces. This has helped to
challenge strictly territorial approaches and to advance alternative spatial imaginations which suggest
that the key issues are not the ‘lines’ or ‘edges’ themselves, or not even the events and processes
occurring in these contexts, but nonmobile and mobile social practices and discourses where borders—
as processes, sets of sociocultural practices, symbols, institutions, and networks— are produced,
reproduced, and transcended. Questions have also been raised as to who is bordering, and how, where,
and why this occurs in certain ways (Johnson et al, 2011). Another challenge is posed by relational
thinking, which has deep roots in the social sciences. Emirbayer (1997) suggests that such thinking has
given rise to a fundamental dilemma: whether to conceive of the social world as consisting primarily
of substances or in processes, in static ‘things’ or in dynamic, unfolding relations. Such dilemma has
long roots in geography and has manifested itself in efforts to abandon container-based views on
territory, region, and place. While relational views can be traced at least to the situation after World
War II, this issue emerged powerfully on the agenda in the 1990s. Massey (1995), for example, argued in
general terms that borders inevitably cut across some other social relations that constitute social space.
Borders do not hence embody any ‘eternal truth of places’ but rather are drawn on by diverging actors
to serve particular purposes. Similarly, the spaces that borders enclose are never culturally ‘pure’
(Massey, 1995), a point which has become increasingly critical around the world when political
extremists claim such purity of state spaces. What is the lesson of the relational approach to border
studies? Possibly the key message is that ‘boundedness’ is a contextual–empirical rather than an
ontological issue, which is of critical importance when moving beyond the territorial–relational
dualism. Cochrane and Ward (2012; cf Paasi, 2012a), for example, have recently criticized this
dichotomy in the context of policy making and policy transfer. They propose that “ policy making has to
be understood as both relational and territorial; as both in motion and simultaneously fixed, or
embedded in place. Rather than merely seeing this as an inherently contradictory process, however,
what matters is to be able to explore the ways in which the working through of the tension serves to
produce policies and places, policies in place. The conventional distinction that is often made between
the two misses the extent to which each necessarily defines and is defined by the other—territories
are not fixed, but the outcome of overlapping and interconnecting sets of social, political, and
economic relations stretching across space, while the existence of identifiable territories shapes and in
some cases limits the ways in which those relations are able to develop (in other words relational space
and territorial space are necessarily entangled)” (page 7). Allen (2011) has argued that territorial,
relational, and topological forms of power/space occur and are ‘twisted’ simultaneously in social
processes. Likewise, complex social and political relations come into play when borders are
established and exploited by various actors in the production and ordering of spaces. Borders are
relational in the sense that they are produced, reproduced, and transformed in diverging social
relations and networks. Also, territorial jurisdictions are sites of complex relational juxtapositions, and
fold different scales in, around, and in-between each other (Healey, 2006).
 “Rethink” Borders – Suture
Reconceptualizing borders as the suture recognizes the violence underpinning the
sovereign’s responsibility to protect and to exile, exposing the border as fabricated
and unnatural
Salter, Professor at the School of Political Studies, University of Ottawa, 2012 (Mark B., “Theory of
the / : The Suture and Critical Border Studies,” Geopolitics, Vol. 17, Iss. 4, October, EBSCO, Accessed
7/10/18 GDI-GN)

The new theoretical touchstones for critical border studies – debordering and rebordering –
emphasise the processes of border-making, or in other words the performativity of the border.1 All
borders are performative: they must be created and given meaning through their delimitation and
transgression.2 The “inside/outside”3 of the sovereign state is not the same as the “hyphennation-
state”4 or the “bounding of the bordering process”5 because the sovereign “/” creates the separate
spaces of domestic law and the international metacommunity. The slash, chasing forward on itself,
creates a division and a unity between the inside and outside. The line has been abandoned as the
primary metaphor of border studies, and I propose here that the suture – as a process of knitting
together the inside and the outside together and the resultant scar – better evokes the performative
aspects of borders. The article first sets out the death of the line as the primary metaphor, develops the
theory of the suture, and then examines the role of the border in Agamben as a theorist of the inside,
Walker as a theorist of the /, and Galli as a theorist of the outside, and the work in border studies that
they have inspired. We argue that despite the reliance on Agamben’s discussion of the ban and the
threshold, his scant work the border lacks any engagement with the international. Walker’s powerful
work on the mutual constitution of inside/outside through “boundaries, borders, and limits” does not
provide any way of distinguishing between sovereign borders and other kinds of boundaries or limits.
Galli argues that borders have become the predominant geopolitical ordering principle, and in effect
making a similar argument to Balibar,6 that borders are everywhere. In each of these cases, the process
required to both separate and unite the inside from the outside, and the radical influence that this has
on the status of law and the right to have rights, is underplayed. As a thinking tool, the suture orients
our analytical attention toward the performativity of the sovereign border to create both sovereign
states and a system of sovereign states, and reinforces both the legal abandonment of that seam and
the differences in the navigation of that performative space made possible through social capital.
Understanding sovereign state borders as a suture can inform our analysis of bordering in a way that
admits the changes in contemporary practices but reaffirms the unique world-building characteristics
of sovereign borders. Sutures are never always or completely successful, just as stitches in a wound
may lead to healing but also leave a trace of their own through the scar. When we move from one
territorial sovereign to another through the border, when we move from one population classification to
another through examination and confession, when the sovereign authority to include or to exile and
the sovereign responsibility to protect become disconnected, in all these moments of rupture, the
suture of sovereignty is revealed. Indeed their very failure reinforces the grand narrative of
sovereignty: borders are created by the assertion of sovereign states, the naturalness of which is
immediately undermined by the fabrication and necessary transgression of the border. The border
naturalises the violence that was necessary to create it. The exclusion of the outside is always already
included in the delimitation of the inside, as Agamben would frame it.7 This ‘inclusive exclusion’ of the
outside has been engaged by a number of philosophers and social critics – but what interests me most
is how these two are made strange and knit together both at the same time. The incompleteness of
the suture, the scar, are haunting reminders of the surplus. The suture is a way of rethinking critically
the dilemma that R. B. J. Walker has posed in his latest ouroboros, After the Globe: Before the World:
anyone seeking to reimagine the possibilities of political life under contemporary conditions would be
wise to resist ambitions expressed as a move from a politics of the international to a politics of the
world, and to pay far greater attention to what goes on at the boundaries, borders and limits of a
politics orchestrated within the international that simultaneously imagines the possibility and
impossibility of a move across the boundaries, border and limits distinguishing itself from some world
beyond.8 736 Mark B. Salter Walker’s formulation of the question provides a much more nuanced
foundation than competing models of the changing nature of borders, by connecting borders not
simply to their function but also to their world-making character. Debrix claims that the suture
functions like ideological interpellation: “The moment when ideology is effectively implemented,
recognized, and internalized by the individual subject ... suture can be seen as having the same effects as
interpellation. It facilitates the identification of the subject-as-spectator with an imaginary
representation, but necessitates the work of a material/visual text in a real contextual framing to take
place ...”9 In these models, there is an ideology of the border as that suture that interpolates all
border-crossers and observers as border-subjects and world-makers, individuals who must be able to
validate their identity and status to cross the border and in doing so authorise sovereign states.
Borders then knit the world together, but also knit us as subjects into the bordered world.

Understanding borders as the suture key to conceptualize the effect of borders on

identity, knitting migrants into the fabric of sovereignty while retaining division and
exclusion
Salter, Professor at the School of Political Studies, University of Ottawa, 2012 (Mark B., “Theory of
the / : The Suture and Critical Border Studies,” Geopolitics, Vol. 17, Iss. 4, October, EBSCO, Accessed
7/10/18 GDI-GN)

Badiou also writes of the “suture” in which “instead of constructing a space of compossibility through
which the thinking of time is practiced, philosophy delegates its functions to one or other of its conditions,
handing over the whole of thought to one generic procedure .”34 Thus the suture of philosophy to its
political geography has meant that the understanding of borders has come to dominate geopolitics
and yet reduced in the actual analysis. All of the particularities of border practices and the minutiae of
740 Mark B. Salter exceptions are subsumed with the generic model of exclusive sovereign territoriality . But,
in addition to listing these anomalies like preclearance areas at airports, we must understand the discursive and political
dynamics of rendering these anomalies anomalous. It is easy to see how this concept can be useful for
interrogating geopolitics and borders. Building from critical work on the construction and
maintenance of the inside/outside boundaries that are so crucial for group and sovereign identities ,
the concept of the suture focuses our analytic attention on those moments of tension, anxiety, displacement,
rupture or abandonment. And, following the recent trend towards analyses of performativity, there is
an emphasis on the practices through which both individuals and states are sutured into the sovereign
state and the globe. Žižek again: “Suture is usually conceived of as the mode in which the exterior is
inscribed in the interior, thus ‘suturing’ the field, producing the effect of self-enclosure with no need
for an exterior, effacing the traces of its own production: traces of the production process, its gaps, its mechanisms, are obliterated, so
that the produce can appear as a naturalized, organic whole.”35 At
the airport, one’s citizenship or refugee status
becomes suddenly apparent and the mask of hegemony slips: the belonging that so many assume to
be inherent, or at least reliable, comes to be interrogated and put into radical question .36 Just as the border-
crossing subject stiches him/herself into the narrative of belonging, so too does the sovereign state
incorporate the subject as a border-crosser than can be accepted or rejected , defining what populations can
move. What was understood as an abstract code for the geopolitical organisation of communities is suddenly represented as a series of
contingent and violent claims to inclusion and exclusion. And, at
that moment of rupture, the world of citizens, states,
and identities must be knitted back together. The suture is the neglected limit of politics and
international relations, the actual face of order and order, order and chaos, inside and frontier, inside and outside. The suture
connects the two spheres of possibility in part by making visible the dividing line between the spaces,
but also insisting on its own presence and character as an exception. The border is possible without
forcing the collapse of the sovereign state because it is described as exceptional. The sutures are portrayed as
exceptions to the general paradigm of sovereignty. But, for everyday life and individuals in transit, a sovereign order
is made possible through their very visible joining and exceptionality – the transit is not empty of meaning: the
border is not a “non-place.”37 The suture is pregnant with meaning – not only by what it creates and separates, but also in the way
that it connects and distinguishes. It renders visible the raw power that must be exerted to hold the two
together and apart. Agamben speaks specifically to the raw decisional power exercised by the sovereign, particularly in exceptional
spaces. Theory of the / 741
 “Rethink” Borders – Suture Solves – Inside/Outside Bad
Borders shape subjectivity and reinforce state sovereignty, categorizing, excluding,
and assimilating migrants – only rethinking the border as the suture recognizes the
pervasive nature of borders
Salter, Professor at the School of Political Studies, University of Ottawa, 2012 (Mark B., “Theory of
the / : The Suture and Critical Border Studies,” Geopolitics, Vol. 17, Iss. 4, October, EBSCO, Accessed
7/10/18 GDI-GN)

Walker’s Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory is one of the most important
books in IR of the past twenty years. It argues that the constitution of political theory and
international relations as mutually constituted ways of knowing about the world in turn reflect “the
limits of the contemporary political imagination” and express “an historically specific understanding of the character and
location of political life in general.”68 Politics and the pursuit of the good life are written as possible only within
the bounds of the sovereign state; anarchy, violence, and insecurity exist outside of the state . Political
theory is only possible within the community ; IR is required for relations between polities. Both political thought
and IR must be understood as theories about borders: the maintenance of political of community, the
strategies of survival within and between political units; the ways in which political, social, or
economic groups might transcend national geographies . The actual role of borders is implicit rather
than explicit (at least until After the Globe, Before the World); although Walker writes that IR is a “discipline
concerned with the delineation of borders,” this is meant primarily in a philosophical sense.69 Similarly, one of the multiple
meanings of sovereignty is given “as a given, as the outer limit of a society, a limit occurring as a geographical frontier and maintained by
procedures of defence and diplomacy ...”70 While Inside/Outside is primarily a book about political theory, Walker
insists that critical
theorists must engage with the grounded, everyday practices of those defence and diplomatic
relations: “Claims to sovereignty involve very concrete political practices , practices that are all the more
consequential to the extent that they are treated as mere abstractions and legal technicalities.”71 The concept of the “work” that
these practices do becomes crucial for understanding sovereignty as performative .72 Walker’s latest book
focuses more specifically on the border: it is a line that cannot be evaded, transcended or ignored . As a
constitutive limit of modern politics in territorial space, it is also a constitutive limit of both modern
political practice and the modern political imagination As a demarcation, however, it is also the site of
a mutual Theory of the / 747 production, and much of what is interesting about it concerns the very active and diverse practices of
mutual production that are enabled once the demarcation has been made.73 He affirms that modern political theory assumes that borders are
both “spatial and legal ... must be congruent, all in the same place, or at least all aligned at the edge of the same abstract space.”74 Like
many border theorists, he argues that this assumption is undermined by the material practices and
imaginations of globalisation. The book is alive to suturing effect of borders “that may seem to have
zero width ... but which nevertheless host the most intense practices of sovereign authorization that
are simultaneously internal and external ... they must also be understood as very intensive sites at which considerable work
must be done so as to affirm and enact the reality of the ideal ...”75 Boundaries, borders, and limits play a signal role in Walker’s core argument
that the modern political imaginary of the world as a system of sovereign states is inescapably tied to the notion that the globe that is
constituted through exclusive claims to sovereignty and territory, and that to try and think outside of this set of nested insides and outsides
would require a whole-scale revision of political thought. Walker’s
argument focuses on the problematic work of
borders to both divide states and constitute a globe. “The reimagination of contemporary political life
especially depends on a willingness to think about boundaries less as sites at which very little happens
except the separation of one political community, or state, or condition, from another, than as very active sites,
moments and practices that work to produce very specific political possibilities of necessity and possibility on either side.”76 Let me ask a
different kind question: how do the boundaries, borders, and lines connect and unite that which they separate? What is the actual suturing
work of the border? Here is my point of critique: because Walker relies on the language of “boundaries,
borders, limits” the argument stuck is a dichotomous circularity: a snake eating itself, simultaneously asserting and
undermining its own categories of inquiry; world, globe, inside, outside. Borders , and the modern political
theory that underpins them and gives them meaning, fix subjectivity, sovereignty, a system of sovereign states, and whatever the
imagination of the global is that exceeds that international system. This figuration provides an excellent viewpoint to understand how borders
limit the political imagination, but it
has already ceded the chief point of its political critique: it cannot imagine
possibilities that are outside the border as division. In contrast, focusing on the suture – the practices
of at once knitting together, separating, and distinguishing multiple insides from multiple outsides and
the resultant site of rupture and repair – allows us to contingently define the dual functions of the
border as tentative separation and as incomplete unification. The suture is thus a thinking tool that helps
us operationalise Walker’s argument. Borders tie together the domestic, the international, and 748 Mark B. Salter the
global, rendering those lines both a visible sign of state legitimacy in the face of the international and invisible as a
sign of the artificiality of the state and the international.
 “Rethink” Borders – Discourse Key
Effects of the US-Mexico border stem from discourse, only rhetoric can reverse our
conceptions of the border as a natural line
Whitley, Doctoral Student, 2015 (Leila Marie, “More than a Line: Borders as Embodied Sites,”
Goldsmiths, University of London, N.D.,
https://research.gold.ac.uk/12314/1/CUL_thesis_WhitleyL_2015.pdf, Accessed 7/9/18 GDI-GN)

The challenge to the border as a line has been less well-developed in relation to borders outside of Europe and only
sparsely discussed in relation to the border that separates the United States from Mexico .3 The
overwhelming visibility of the long and heavily defended geographical border between the United
States and Mexico has perhaps not invited analysis that looks beyond this spatiality . It is impossible to
discount the importance of this space as a specific space , and there is a strong and well-developed body of
work that considers the importance of the particular geography that territorially separates one nation from
the next and the effects of the border in this space on migration (Andreas, 2009; De Genova, 2013; Doty, 2011; Dunn,
2005, 2009; Nevins, 2002). Much of the work that engages with the USMexico border finds its disciplinary home in social-science driven
disciplines and as a result, tends to focus on the history of the region, the government policies regulating
migration and control of the border, and detailed accounts of the experiences of migrants who have
moved from south of the US-Mexico border (which does not necessarily mean from Mexico) to the United States. Work that
draws on critical theory and philosophy to theorize the border as is found within CBS in Europe is much less common, with a few notable
exceptions (c.f De Genova, 2010; Doty, 2011; Coleman, 2009). Workthat complicates the theory of the US-Mexico
border as a line is not however entirely absent. When it appears, it tends to take a slightly different form in
the United States and to have a different disciplinary background . One field where this challenge has been taken up is
within Communication Studies. In this field, there is a discussion of rhetorics of the border. This work tends to
draw on the same philosophical canon of CBS, in this case calling it postmodern theory (DeChaine, 2009, p.44). In
this subfield, there is a readiness to consider the border as an effect of rhetoric and as constitutive of
border(ed) identities. For instance, DeChaine writes of the “truth function” of the border and explains there is a
need to focus on the “constructedness and on the ambivalent identities of border(ed) subjects ” (2009,
p.45). This draws attention to borders as constructs that shape understandings and values in the human world and also as products of human
activities. There is a strong sense in this field, following Stuart Hall, that discourse matters (Ono, 2012, p.20). Ono and Sloop, for
example, argue that discourse can figuratively shift borders so that borders are moved and redefined
through the ways they are discussed (Ono and Sloop, 2002). In a later piece of work, Ono (2012) goes on to argue that discourse
is intrinsic to the meaning of the border. In this piece, he focuses on the figural border which he describes as “the
border not at the border, or, rather, the border that travels ” (2012, p.20, original emphasis). The insistence on
describing the figural border as opposed to the border at the border points to the way the field leaves
untouched the distinction between the physical US-Mexico border (i.e “real”) and the figural border that is an effect
of discourse and social practices and which is mobile. Therefore what Communication Studies potentially leaves intact
within its critical consideration of immigration discourse is the naturalization of the metaphor of the
border as a line. What I am arguing is that the physical border, and the conception of a border as a line, is as much
a metaphor as the social processes of bordering are real.
 Levinasian Ethics
The alternative is Levinasian ethics. Only a complete overhaul of normative modes of
thought is neccessary to overcome the structures of power that reinforce biopolitical
management and control.
Prioritize the deconstruction of biopolitical norms and the reconceptualization of
sovereignity. The aff will inevitably fail because in the process of naturalization the
refugee simultaneously becomes a citizen but further excluded from society. Only the
alt solves.
Zylinska, Referee for the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada,
2014 (Joanna, “The universal acts, Judith Butler and the biopolitics of immigration,” Cultural Studies
18.4, GDI JM)

The notion of biopolitics comes from Michel Foucault, who in the final section of The History of Sexuality
puts forward a claim that, in modernity, ancient sovereign power exerted over life and death has been
replaced by bio-power: ‘a power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death’ (1984, p. 138).
Biopolitics thus describes the processes through which Western democracies, with all their regulatory
and corrective mechanisms, administer life by exercising power over the species body (1984, p. 139).
What is now at issue, according to Foucault, is not so much ‘bringing death into play in the field of
sovereignty’ as instantiating the idea and sense of the norm, which is supposed to regulate society and
ensure the intactness of its sovereign authority. The biopolitics of immigration - one of the forms
through which bio-power is enacted in Western democracies and through which life is ‘managed’ -
thus contributes to the development of the idea of normative universality, against which particular
acts of political (mis)practice can be judged. And yet, as Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida and Ernesto
Laclau have demonstrated in numerous works, the notion of universality proposed in official political
discourses always entails (or is contaminated by, as Laclau has it) a certain particularity. Indeed, the
universal juridico-political acts acquire their ‘universal’ value only if they draw on the particularity of the
official and non-official regulatory mechanisms that are supposed to exclude whatever may pose a
threat to this idea of universality. This is to say, they rely on state legislation already in place, on the
concept of citizenship embraced by the democratic community, but also on ‘public opinion’ that has
to be taken into account and responded to. Butler in particular has gone to great lengths to expose the
productive ambiguity entailed in the notion of an act -/ an ambiguity that the title of my article is
intended to convey.2 The noun group ‘the universal acts’ (no matter whether we are speaking more
generally about foundational acts of Western democracies, or, more specifically, about legal acts
regulating issues of nationality and immigration) is also a clause, pointing to the transition process in
which the timelessness of universality is put in question. If the universal acts , it is then taken out of the
frozenness of an instant and undergoes a certain transformation, maybe even a deformation. The acting
out of universality simultaneously establishes this very idea of universality through the sequence of
acts, through their citation, or repetition. I thus want to argue here that the alleged universality of the
acts and actions directed at, or involving, asylum seekers, is in fact only established through the working
of the performative, i.e. through the reiterative performance of these acts. However, I will also claim
that this biopolitics of immigration both presupposes - in the form of an injunction - and produces a
certain ethics: what I will call, drawing on Butler’s work, ‘an ethics of bodies that matter’. It is precisely
this ethics of bodies that matter that I will see as a source of political hope, as well as a guarantee of the
possibility of enacting differently the political acts which regulate the issues of asylum, immigration and
nationality. The notion of ethics I will use will be based on the work of Emmanuel Levinas, for whom
ethics is the ‘first philosophy’, situated ‘even before ontology’, and thus ‘before politics’ - not in the
temporal sense, but rather in the form of an unconditional demand on the conditioned universe, with its
particular places, customs and political acts. Levinasian ethics - defined as concern about the alterity of
the other, but also as response and responsibility - is most pertinent for my investigation as it seems
to tally with the multiculturalist position of ‘respect for cultural difference’ that might be easily,
perhaps too easily, applied to ‘the issue of asylum seekers’.3 But it is the rigour of Levinas’s philosophy
that allows me to question what is actually meant by this idea of ‘respecting the other’. However, I
would like to defer talking about ethics as response and responsibility and dwell for a little while on
notions of ethos (understood as ‘custom’) and ethnos (‘place’) that underlie certain ethical conceptions
but which also provide a bridge to the political. It is the customs, norms and regulations of the
democratic public sphere that will be of particular interest to me. It is through Butler’s engagement with
‘bodies that matter’ that I now want to sketch an ethical response to the biopolitics of immigration
practised by the UK and many other ‘sovereign democracies’. Of course, Butler’s own argument
develops out of the investigation of the ‘heterosexual matrix’ which legislates genders through the
reiterated acting of accepted gender roles. Nevertheless, it also enables us to think through the
regulatory mechanisms that are involved in producing/performing legitimate citizenship. Butler suggests
that in our investigation of juridical acts that legislate different forms of political subjectivity we should
turn to the notion of matter, ‘not as a site or surface, but as a process of materialization that stabilizes
over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface we call matter ’ (1993, p. 9, original
emphasis). She is interested in investigating how the materialization of the norm in bodily formation
produces a domain of abjected bodies, a field of deformation that, in failing to qualify as the fully
human, fortifies those regulatory norms (1993, p. 16). But the main thrust of her investigation is to find
out what this contamination means for the ‘universal acts’ of Western democracies, and for the
political actions embarked upon to guarantee the survival of these acts. And, further, if there is a certain
ambivalence already inherent in these acts, can we think them otherwise? Butler thus formulates the
following question: ‘What challenge does that excluded and abjected realm produce to a symbolic
hegemony that might force a radical rearticulation of what qualifies as bodies that matter, ways of
living that count as ‘‘life’’, lives worth protecting, lives worth saving, lives worth grieving?’ (1993, p.
16). I want to suggest that the challenge that the excluded and abjected realm produces to a symbolic
hegemony therefore comes in the form of an ethical injunction, in revealing the originary ethicality of
the ‘universal political acts’ already in place. For these acts -/ such as the 2002 Nationality, Immigration
and Asylum Act - can only be formulated in response to the other, an other whose being precedes the
political and makes a demand on it. Knocking on the door of Western democracies, ‘bodies that matter’
are ethical in the originary Levinasian sense; they are already taken account of, even if they are to be
latter found not to matter so much to these sovereign regimes. Butler’s argument thus poses a blow to
the alleged sovereignty of the democratic subject, whose response to the needs of the ‘other’ has to be
properly managed through the application of utilitarian principles intermixed with a dose of human-
rights rhetoric. Though in Excitable Speech she does not arrive at her questioning of political subjectivity
via Levinas but rather via a parallel reading of Austin and Althusser, to me her account of ‘how the
subject constituted through the address of the Other becomes then a subject capable of addressing
others’ (1997, p. 26) sounds positively Levinasian.9 In Totality and Infinity , Levinas describes this
relationship between self and other in the following way: The alleged scandal of alterity presupposes
the tranquil identity of the same, a freedom sure of itself which is exercised without scruples, and to
whom the foreigner brings only constraint and limitation. This flawless identity freed from all
participation, independent in the I, can nonetheless lose its tranquillity if the other, rather than
countering it by upsurging on the same plane as it, speaks to it, that is, shows himself in expression, in
the face, and comes from on high. Freedom then is inhibited, not as countered by a resistance, but as
arbitrary, guilty, and timid; but in its guilt it rises to responsibility. .. . The relation with the Other as a
relation with his transcendence - the relation with the Other who puts into question the brutal
spontaneity of one’s imminent destiny - introduces into me what was not in me. (1969, p. 103) Levinas
understands this inevitability of responsibility and ethics as a need to respond to what precedes me and
challenges my self-sufficiency and oneness, to what calls on me to justify ‘my place under the sun’. This
realization is crucial for developing our notion of citizenship and political justice. To actively become a
citizen, a host, a member of the public sphere -/ instead of just passively finding oneself inhabiting it
as a result of an alleged privilege that occludes what it excludes -/ I need the other not in a negative
sense, as an outside to my own positive identity, but to put me in question and make me aware of my
responsibility. This is the only way in which mature political participation can take place; otherwise we
will only be ‘running a software’, as Derrida describes it, i.e. applying a ready-made computer program
to an allegedly predictable situation in which a need for a decision gives way to a technicized
manoeuvre. It is the other that makes me aware of the idea of infinity in me, an idea that, according to
Levinas, ‘establishes ethics’ (1969, p. 204). Through an encounter with the other I realize that the
political subjectivity I inhabit is always temporarily stabilized, that it can be changed, redrafted or, to use
Butler’s term, recited. And it is biopolitics that establishes a certain sense of normativity through
managing and regulating ‘bare life’, a life that is subject to this ethical injunction, to intrusion and
wounding, to a call to response and responsibility. Levinas writes, ‘To be a body is on the one hand to
stand [se tenir ], to be master of oneself, and, on the other hand, to stand on the earth, to be in the
other , and thus to be encumbered by one’s body. But - we repeat - this encumberment is not produced
as a pure dependence; it forms the happiness of him who enjoys it’ (1969, p. 164, original emphasis).
One might perhaps conclude that the situation the self finds itself in is indeed tragic, and that the need
to bear the weight of corporeality that is not all mine does not easily lead to ‘happiness’. However,
Levinas does not propose a na¨ıve celebration of difference; he only suggests the openness to (or the
enjoyment of) what befalls us may be, in the long term, an easier and better response to our corporeal
existence. It is precisely this openness and enjoyment that my term ‘an ethics of bodies that matter’
refers to. The problem of openness which is to be extended to our current and prospective guests -/
even, or perhaps especially , unwanted ones -/ is, according to Derrida, coextensive with the ethical
problem. ‘It is always about answering for a dwelling place, for one’s identity, one’s space, one’s limits,
for the ethos as abode, habitation, house, hearth, family, home’ (Derrida 2000, pp. 149 - 151, emphasis
added). Of course, this absolute and unlimited hospitality can be seen as crazy, self-harming or even
impossible. But ethics in fact spans two different realms: it is always suspended between this
unconditional hyperbolic order of the demand to answer for my place under the sun and open to the
alterity of the other that precedes me, and the conditional order of ethnos , of singular customs, norms,
rules, places and political acts. If we see ethics as situated between these two different poles, it
becomes clearer why we always remain in a relationship to ethics, why we must respond to it, or, in
fact, why we will be responding to it no matter what . Even if we respond ‘non- ethically’ to our guest
by imposing on him a norm or political legislation as if it came from us ; even if we decide to close the
door in the face of the other, make him wait outside for an extended period of time, send him back, cut
off his benefits or place him in a detention centre, we must already respond to an ethical call. In this
sense, our politics is preceded by an ethical injunction, which does not of course mean that we will
‘respond ethically’ to it (by offering him unlimited hospitality or welcome). However, and here lies the
paradox, we will respond ethically to it (in the sense that the injunction coming from the other will
make us take a stand, even if we choose to do nothing whatsoever and pretend that we may carry on as
if nothing has happened). The ethics of bodies that matter also entails the possibility of changing the
laws and acts of the polis and delineating some new forms of political identification and belonging.
Indeed, in their respective readings of Antigone, Butler and Derrida show us not only that the paternal
law towards the foreigner that regulates the idea of kinship in Western democracies can be altered but
also that we can think community and kinship otherwise. If traditional hospitality is based on what
Derrida calls ‘a conjugal model, paternal and phallocentric’, in which ‘[i]t’s the familial despot, the
father, the spouse, and the boss, the master of the house who lays down the laws of hospitality’ (2000,
p. 149), openness towards the alien and the foreign changes the very nature of the polis , with its
Oedipal kinship structures and gender laws. Since, as Butler shows us, due to new family affiliations
developed by queer communities but also as a result of developments in genomics it is no longer clear
who my brother is, the logic of national identity and kinship that protects state boundaries against the
‘influx’ of asylum seekers is to be left wanting. This is not necessarily to advise a carnivalesque political
strategy of abandoning all laws, burning all passports and opening all borders (although such actions
should at least be considered ), but to point to the possibility of resignifying these laws through their
(improper) reiteration. Enacted by political subjects whose own embodiment remains in the state of
tension with the normative assumptions regarding propriety, gender and kinship that underlie these
laws, the laws of hospitality are never carried out according to the idea/l they are supposed to entail
(cf. Butler 1993, p. 231). It is precisely Butler’s account of corporeality and matter, of political
subjectivity and kinship, which makes Levinas’ ethics (and Derrida’s reworking of it) particularly relevant
to this project. Although the concepts of the body and materiality are not absent from Levinas’ writings
-/ indeed, he was one of the first thinkers to identify embodiment as a philosophical blindspot - Butler
allows us to redraw the boundaries of the bodies that matter and question the mechanisms of their
constitution. Her ‘others’ are not limited to ‘the stranger’, ‘the orphan’ and the ‘widow’ of the Judeo-
Christian tradition, the more acceptable others who evoke sympathy and generate pity.10 It is also
the AIDS sufferer, the transsexual and the drag queen - people whose bodies and relationships violate
traditional gender and kinship structures - that matter to her. By investigating the contingent limits of
universalization, Butler mobilizes us against naturalizing exclusion from the democratic polis and thus
creates an opportunity for its radicalization (1997, p. 90).

The biopolitics of immigration contributes to the idea of a normative universality

against which particular political acts can be morally judged; this universality relies on
violent exclusions of bodies deemed inhuman.
Zylinska, Referee for the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada,
2014 (Joanna, “The universal acts, Judith Butler and the biopolitics of immigration,” Cultural Studies
18.4, GDI JM)

The notion of biopolitics comes from Michel Foucault, who in the final section of The History of Sexuality
puts forward a claim that, in modernity, ancient sovereign power exerted over life and death has been
replaced by bio-power: ‘a power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death’ (1984, p. 138).
Biopolitics thus describes the processes through which Western democracies, with all their regulatory
and corrective mechanisms, administer life by exercising power over the species body (1984, p. 139).
What is now at issue, according to Foucault, is not so much ‘bringing death into play in the field of
sovereignty’ as instantiating the idea and sense of the norm, which is supposed to regulate society and
ensure the intactness of its sovereign authority. The biopolitics of immigration / one of the forms
through which bio-power is enacted in Western democracies and through which life is ‘managed’ / thus
contributes to the development of the idea of normative universality, against which particular acts of
political (mis)practice can be judged. And yet, as Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida and Ernesto Laclau have
demonstrated in numerous works, the notion of universality proposed in official political discourses
always entails (or is contaminated by, as Laclau has it) a certain particularity. Indeed, the universal
juridico-political acts acquire their ‘universal’ value only if they draw on the particularity of the official
and non-official regulatory mechanisms that are supposed to exclude whatever may pose a threat to
this idea of universality. This is to say, they rely on state legislation already in place, on the concept of
citizenship embraced by the democratic community, but also on ‘public opinion’ that has to be taken
into account and responded to. Butler in particular has gone to great lengths to expose the productive
ambiguity entailed in the notion of an act / an ambiguity that the title of my article is intended to
convey.2 The noun group ‘the universal acts’ (no matter whether we are speaking more generally about
foundational acts of Western democracies, or, more specifically, about legal acts regulating issues of
nationality and immigration) is also a clause, pointing to the transition process in which the timelessness
of universality is put in question. If the universal acts , it is then taken out of the frozenness of an instant
and undergoes a certain transformation, maybe even a deformation. The acting out of universality
simultaneously establishes this very idea of universality through the sequence of acts, through their
citation, or repetition. I thus want to argue here that the alleged universality of the acts and actions
directed at, or involving, asylum seekers, is in fact only established through the working of the
performative, i.e. through the reiterative performance of these acts. However, I will also claim that this
biopolitics of immigration both presupposes / in the form of an injunction / and produces a certain
ethics: what I will call, drawing on Butler’s work, ‘an ethics of bodies that matter’. It is precisely this
ethics of bodies that matter that I will see as a source of political hope, as well as a guarantee of the
possibility of enacting differently the political acts which regulate the issues of asylum, immigration and
nationality.
 Levinasian Ethics Solves – Hospitality
The biopolitical (conditional) nature of immigration controls makes hospitality
impossible
Ajana 2006 [Btihaj, “Immigration Interrupted,” Journal for Cultural Research, 10.3]
In Levinasian ethics, responsibility does not exhaust itself in the ‘deed’; in what one does for/to the
Other5 (Levinas 1982, p. 96), but responsibility is primarily the evocation of response entreated
through the Other’s face, which allows one to enter into an ethical relationship with otherness. As
such, one is always and inevitably responsible for the Other by virtue of his/her proximity to the ‘face’ of
alterity which presents itself not so much in the measuring of spacing between singularities but rather
insofar as it brings the subject into existence through the soliciting of speech and the embodiment of the
relation of self to the Other. In taking account of the face, the Other can no longer be abstracted into
mere ‘graspable’ categories of ‘possession’ (an asylum seeker, a refugee, a detainee, etc.) but moves
into a dimension of expression in which ‘the face resists possession, resists my powers’ (Levinas 1969,
p. 197) and, therefore, decentres subjectivity (Campbell 1999, p. 33) and disturbs the will to ‘ignore’
this infinite responsibility. Facial practices such as eyelid and lip sewing are illustrations of ‘This bond
between expression and responsibility’ (Levinas 1969, p. 200) by which some of the ‘asylum seekers’ and
‘detainees’ assert their agency and make their ethical call heard.6 But perceived from the vantage point
of politics, the response to this call would be merely that of obligation; the obligation to put an end to
what is perceived in the (Western) politics as a ‘barbarian blackmailing’ that stirs up the anger of
taxpayers (in other words, the ‘belonging’, ‘good’ citizens – absolute figures). Whereas, from an ethical
standpoint, the very manifestation of this helpless plea would be in itself an attestation to the failure
of politics – without which the self-inflicted bodily harm would not have occurred in the first place – and
a demand for a response that goes beyond duty, morals and obligation i.e. a response embedded
within the ethics of absolute hospitality and pure generosity. This disjuncture between the political
totality and the ethical infinity marks the abyssal hiatus between conditional (not only in the Kantian
sense) and unconditional hospitality (Derrida 2000). For conditional hospitality entails a measuring of
actions, a calculation of responsibility and a selection of those to whom one may/should be
hospitable/responsible. This is indeed the political hospitality manifested, for instance, in what Cohen
(2003, p. 72) calls ‘economic elitism’ found in the schemes of points system and work permits which
function by means of filtering those who may economically contribute ‘more to the public purse’
(Spencer, in Cohen 2003, p. 73) from those who have ‘little or nothing to contribute’ (Cohen 2003, p.
73). Added to that the current ‘Worker Registration Scheme’ in the United Kingdom relating to nationals
of the new European Union member states7 as well as the proposed quotas for asylum seekers.
Ramifications of this political hospitality are damaging and violent in that not only modes of
discrimination, inequality and exclusion are systematically implemented, but also, the absolute
responsibility for the Other is negated and overridden by an exigency for reciprocity or a demand for
repayment: ‘we have offered a home to families who want to come here, work hard and make a positive
contribution to our society’ (Howard 2005). In contrast, unconditional hospitality is a response to the
ethical imperative which precedes the realm of politics, philosophy and sociality. It is offered to
anyone and everyone regardless of whether they are TB/HIV negative or not, whether they are skilled
migrants or not, whether they would contribute to the economy or not, whether they would conform to
the customs and values of the host entity or not. This notion of hospitality entails a responsibility that
has no limits, no particularity, and an absolute openness to the Other that goes beyond any
expectation, determination and knowledge. For ‘hospitality is…an experience which proceeds beyond
knowledge toward the other as absolute stranger, as unknown, where I know that I know nothing of
him’ (Derrida 2000, p. 8) – so much so that the subject becomes not a host but a ‘hostage’ to the Other
(Levinas in Derrida 2000, p. 9) with no choice but to be responsible and hence hospitable. (However, this
notion of being hostage to the Other is not to be regarded in negative terms for it is the alterity of the
other and his/her call that shape one’s subjectivity, incite one to think, to feel (Diprose 2002, p. 134) and
to become). Thus, and to use Levinas’ (1981, p. 98) allegory, which is probably derived from Nietzsche’s
(1997, p. 91) ‘Ye love your virtue as a mother loveth her child; but when did one hear of a mother
wanting to be paid for her love?’, the ethical relation of self (in our case, this would be the State) to the
Other becomes something akin to the relation of the mother to her foetus; an inevitable and, at times,
excessive responsibility for which nothing is necessarily expected in return.
 Levinasian Ethics Solves – Managerialism
The politics of the status quo are anethical—politics has been reduced to the mere
technical virtuosity of re-arranging the various resources available for the
administration and calculation of life. Alternatively, we could align ourselves in an
ethical relationship to life. Ethics is not apolitical—it gives an account for why we are
about the bodies that matter.
Zylinska, Referee for the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada,
2014 (Joanna, “The universal acts, Judith Butler and the biopolitics of immigration,” Cultural Studies
18.4, GDI JM)

The notion of ethics I will use will be based on the work of Emmanuel Levinas, for whom ethics is the
‘first philosophy’, situated ‘even before ontology’, and thus ‘before politics’ / not in the temporal
sense, but rather in the form of an unconditional demand on the conditioned universe, with its
particular places, customs and political acts. Levinasian ethics / defined as concern about the alterity of
the other, but also as response and responsibility / is most pertinent for my investigation as it seems to
tally with the multiculturalist position of ‘respect for cultural difference’ that might be easily, perhaps
too easily, applied to ‘the issue of asylum seekers’.3 But it is the rigour of Levinas’s philosophy that
allows me to question what is actually meant by this idea of ‘respecting the other’. However, I would like
to defer talking about ethics as response and responsibility and dwell for a little while on notions of
ethos (understood as ‘custom’) and ethnos (‘place’) that underlie certain ethical conceptions but
which also provide a bridge to the political. It is the customs, norms and regulations of the democratic
public sphere that will be of particular interest to me. The ‘issue’ of asylum seekers lies at the very
heart of the broader issue concerning the constitution of the public sphere. For Butler democratic
participation in the public sphere is enabled by the preservation of its boundaries, and by the
simultaneous establishment of its ‘constitutive outside’. She argues that in contemporary Western
democracies numerous singular lives are being barred from the life of the legitimate community, in
which standards of recognition allow one access to the category of ‘the human’. In order to develop a
set of norms intended to regulate the state organism, biopolitics needs to establish a certain exclusion
from these norms, to protect the constitution of the polis and distinguish it from what does not
‘properly’ belong to it. The biopolitics of immigration looks after the bodies of the host community
and protects it against parasites that might want to invade it, but it needs to equip itself with tools
that will allow it to trace, detect and eliminate these parasites. Technology is mobilized to probe and
scan the bare life of those wanting to penetrate the healthy body politic: through the use of
fingerprinting, iris recognition and scanners in lorries travelling, for example, across the English Channel,
the presence and legitimacy of ‘asylum seekers’ can be determined and fixed.4 The bio-politics of
immigration is thus performative in the sense of the term used by Butler; through the probing of
human bodies, a boundary between legitimate and illegitimate members of the community is
established. This process depends on a truth regime already in place, a regime that classifies some
bodies as ‘genuine’ and others (be it emaciated bodies of refugees squashed in lorries in which they
have been smuggled to the ‘West’, or confined to the leaky Tampa ship hopelessly hovering off the
shores of Australia) as ‘bogus’. The bare life of the host community thus needs to be properly
managed and regulated, with its unmanageable aspects placed in what Agamben (1998) calls a
relation of exception. But the question that remains occluded in these processes of ‘life management’
is ‘[w]hich bodies come to matter / and why?’ (Butler 1993, p. xii).

Their ethical relationship to the immigrant reifies the sovereign exception because the
biopolitical understanding of obligation instrumentalizes individual lives in the name
of a species which stands for an originary subject which must be protected from
dependence on an Other at any cost. The existential danger the other presents to
sovereignty brings us to flee to merely technical manipulations of immigration
questions.
Zylinska, Referee for the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada,
2014 (Joanna, “The universal acts, Judith Butler and the biopolitics of immigration,” Cultural Studies
18.4, GDI JM)

I want to suggest that the challenge that the excluded and abjected realm produces to a symbolic
hegemony therefore comes in the form of an ethical injunction, in revealing the originary ethicality of
the ‘universal political acts’ already in place. For these acts / such as the 2002 Nationality, Immigration
and Asylum Act / can only be formulated in response to the other, an other whose being precedes the
political and makes a demand on it . Knocking on the door of Western democracies, ‘bodies that
matter’ are ethical in the originary Levinasian sense; they are already taken account of, even if they
are to be latter found not to matter so much to these sovereign regimes. Butler’s argument thus poses
a blow to the alleged sovereignty of the democratic subject, whose response to the needs of the
‘other’ has to be properly managed through the application of utilitarian principles intermixed with a
dose of human-rights rhetoric. Though in Excitable Speech she does not arrive at her questioning of
political subjectivity via Levinas but rather via a parallel reading of Austin and Althusser, to me her
account of ‘how the subject constituted through the address of the Other becomes then a subject
capable of addressing others’ (1997, p. 26) sounds positively Levinasian.9 In Totality and Infinity , Levinas
describes this relationship between self and other in the following way: The alleged scandal of alterity
presupposes the tranquil identity of the same, a freedom sure of itself which is exercised without
scruples, and to whom the foreigner brings only constraint and limitation. This flawless identity freed
from all participation, independent in the I, can nonetheless lose its tranquillity if the other, rather
than countering it by upsurging on the same plane as it, speaks to it, that is, shows himself in
expression, in the face, 5 3 2 CULTURAL STUDIES and comes from on high. Freedom then is inhibited,
not as countered by a resistance, but as arbitrary, guilty, and timid; but in its guilt it rises to
responsibility. . . . The relation with the Other as a relation with his transcendence / the relation with
the Other who puts into question the brutal spontaneity of one’s imminent destiny / introduces into
me what was not in me. Levinas understands this inevitability of responsibility and ethics as a need to
respond to what precedes me and challenges my self-sufficiency and oneness, to what calls on me to
justify ‘my place under the sun’. This realization is crucial for developing our notion of citizenship and
political justice. To actively become a citizen, a host, a member of the public sphere / instead of just
passively finding oneself inhabiting it as a result of an alleged privilege that occludes what it
excludes / I need the other not in a negative sense, as an outside to my own positive identity, but to
put me in question and make me aware of my responsibility. This is the only way in which mature
political participation can take place; otherwise we will only be ‘running a software’, as Derrida
describes it, i.e. applying a ready-made computer program to an allegedly predictable situation in
which a need for a decision gives way to a technicized manoeuvre. It is the other that makes me aware
of the idea of infinity in me, an idea that, according to Levinas, ‘establishes ethics’ (1969, p. 204).
Through an encounter with the other I realize that the political subjectivity I inhabit is always
temporarily stabilized, that it can be changed, redrafted or, to use Butler’s term, recited. And it is
biopolitics that establishes a certain sense of normativity through managing and regulating ‘bare life’,
a life that is subject to this ethical injunction, to intrusion and wounding, to a call to response and
responsibility.
 Levinasian Ethics Solves – Politics
Their notion of ethics is apolitical because is presupposes that there is a prepolitical
(instrumental) nature of things which determines political calculation. This divorces
ethics from politics in appearance only: their relationship to value means that their
relationship to politics is doomed to exclude and purify undesirable bodies which fall
outside their scope of ethical assumption.
Zylinska, Referee for the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada,
2014 (Joanna, “The universal acts, Judith Butler and the biopolitics of immigration,” Cultural Studies
18.4, GDI JM)

Butler demonstrates the regulatory mechanisms involved in the production and simultaneous exclusion
of ‘bare life’ in a number of her works, referring to such excluded groups as transsexuals and
transgender people (1990, 1993), non-traditional family units (1990, 1993), racial minorities (1997) or
even cyborgs (1993). But it is the literary heroine Antigone, analysed in Antigone’s Claim: Kinship
Between Life and Death, that I want to turn to for my discussion of the issue of asylum seekers in
Western democracies. Butler’s reading of Antigone, who, ‘[p]rohibited from action, . . . nevertheless
acts’, and whose ‘act is hardly a simple assimilation to an existing norm’ (2002, p. 82), will allow me to
think about the working of the performative in different political discourses, and about the possibility
of their resignification. 5 2 6 CULTURAL STUDIES For Butler, Antigone ‘is not of the human but speaks in
its language’, thus upsetting ‘the vocabulary of kinship that is the precondition of the human’ but also
enacting a possibility ‘for a new field of the human, . . . the one that happens when the less than
human speaks as human, when gender is displaced, and kinship founders on its own founding laws’
(2002, p. 82). Antigone indicates the political possibility ‘that emerges when the limits to
representation and representability are exposed’ (2002, p. 2). Butler thus takes issue with Hegel’s
perception of Antigone, whom he does not see as a political figure but rather as ‘one who articulates a
prepolitical opposition to politics’ (2002, p. 2). Hegel introduces a strict caesura between the law of the
household gods, which Antigone both represents and dissolves, and the emergent ethical order and
state authority based on principles of universality. The ethical as the realm of articulated norms, habits
and customs (i.e. ethos ), and the political as the realm of participation, together constitute the public
sphere, which is opposed in Hegel to the sphere of kinship. Yet Butler points out that this idealized
separation does not in fact work, as even though she is situated outside the terms of the polis ,
Antigone enables its very functioning by being its ‘constitutive outside’, i.e. she confirms and actively
contributes to its constitutive exclusions. Instead of accepting Hegel’s reading of Antigone as the story
of the superseding of the order of kinship with the ethical order belonging to the state, Butler looks at
the process of disruption that kinship (understood broadly as ‘family’ but not in any normative sense)
poses to the idea of the state as we know it. Her Antigone is not confined to the order of the pre-
political but rather incarnates ‘a politics . . . of the scandalously impure’ (2002, p. 5).
 “Rethink” Borders – Transnationalism
Rethinking borders as transnational denaturalizes the state’s role in constructing
borders around nature, manipulating labor and goods through biopolitical regulation
Sackman, Professor of History at the University of Puget Sound, 2014 (Douglas, “Trafficking Nature
and Labor Across Borders: The Transnational Return of US Environmental History,” International Labor
and Working Class History; Cambridge, Vol. 85, Spring, Proquest, Accessed 7/9/18 GDI-GN)

Transnational environmental history, then, has the power and promise to denaturalize the nation. At the
same time, it helps focus attention on the state's roles in constructing nature--denaturalizing it to boot. It
also can help us trace how the mobility of human beings around the planet and their work in extracting
and consuming natural resources have been constitutive of nations themselves as well as the larger
formation called, alternatively, global capitalism, the modern world system, or simply empire. 12 Geographers,
anthropologists, and political theorists focusing on migration are increasingly interested in the
Foucouldian "biopolitics" of borders--how walls and fences , real and virtual, are implicated in the
construction of citizenship and legal and illicit traffic . 13Though used in different senses, biopower can refer to
the modern state's interest in cataloging and controlling life from the ground up and from all parts of
the globe into their national domains. These controls and efforts of legibility are sharpened as people
and nature move across nationally claimed territories . According to Jonathan Inda, since at least the beginning of
Operation Gatekeeper in the mid-1990s, the line between the United States and Mexico has become a biopolitical
border where "the state creates a wedge between the normal and the pathological , distinguishing between
those bodies that can be represented in the polity and those that cannot ... implicitly [judging] them to be expendable, suggesting that their
lives aren't quite worth living." 14The
biopolitics of borders should be a topic of mutual interest to
environmental historians, but we should reframe the "bio" in "biopower" to include the life of
nonhumans caught up in transborder traffic as well as issues of environmental justice. To take stock of the
convergence of environmental and transnational history--or what I am calling the transnational return of environmental
history--we need to consider briefly national and transnational pathways created by environmental
history at its point of origin and then review how labor has been integrated into the field over the last
generation. Next, we'll consider a sampling of new works exploring US borderlands--with Mexico, the Pacific, and Canada--that
shed light on the integral involvement of the environment and labor in creating transnational
phenomena. To map the twined traffic in nature and labor across borders is to map transnationalism.
 Micropolitical Resistance Solves
Interrogating the biopolitical sovereign and it’s relations to neoliberalism is key to
overcoming it
Sparke, Professor in the Politics Department at UC Santa Cruz, 2006 [M.B., ‘A Neoliberal Nexus:
Economy, Security and the Biopolitics of Citizenship on the Border’, Political Geography 25(2), pp. 151-
180 GDI – JM]

Alongside the lessons that can be garnered about neoliberalism's contradictions from studying its
uneven innovation and implementation as a macrological mode of governance, the actual approach
taken in what follows to the neoliberalism of the NEXUS program draws just as much for inspiration
on the more micrological approach to neoliberal power relations developed in the governmentality
literature (Burchell et al 1991). In an exception to his normal focus on the development of government
in France, Foucault spent some time in his 1979 Collège de France lectures also examining German and
American innovations in liberal government. Especially in his account of Gary Becker and the Chicago
School, Foucault was keen to chart the totalizing assumptions of neoliberal economic theory and, in
particular, its assumptions about a new homo economicus, an "individual producer-consumer," in
Colin Gordon's gloss, who is "not just an enterprise, but the entrepreneur of himself or herself"
(Gordon, 1991: 44). In Gordon's interpretation this normative model of personhood identified by
Foucault as a symptomatic feature of neoliberalism simultaneously signified a wholesale transformation
of societal belonging too: a transformation from a society of collective citizenship to a society of
radically individuated citizenship, a new market-mediated society over which state practices rule as
what Foucault called "une sorte de tribunal économique permanent" - a kind of permanent economic
tribunal (quoted and translated in Lemke, 2001: 198). As a result, argues Gordon, the transition from
liberal Keynesian government to neoliberal government means that: "[t]he notion of the social body as a
collective subject committed to the reparation of the injuries suffered by its individual members gives […
way to a new] role for the state as a custodian of a collective reality principle, distributing the disciplines
of the competitive world market throughout the interstices of the social body" (Gordon, 1991: 45). Also
following Foucault, other theorists of governmentality such as Thomas Lemke suggest in this way that
"the key feature of neo-liberal rationality is the congruence it endeavours to achieve between a
responsible and moral individual and an economic-rational actor" (Lemke, 2001: 197). Lemke might
just as well have said "responsible and moral citizen" because it is precisely the normative individuality
of national citizenship that neoliberal governmental practices are busily reworking into a new more
market-mediated "citizenship regime" of economic-rational actors (Dobrowolsky and Jenson, 2004; and
Jenson and Phillips, 1996). Expanding on Lemke's argument, Wendy Brown underlines that in this way
neo- liberalism "normatively constructs and interpellates individuals as entrepreneurial actors in
every sphere of life" (Brown, 2003). As Barry Hindess (2002) further points out, these marketization
developments in governmentality therefore have profound consequences for both the political and
the social rights of citizenship we have inherited from struggles of the twentieth century (cf Fraser,
2003). He argues thus that "political rights (such as they are) may remain but their scope is restricted as
market regulation takes over from direct regulation by state agencies and the judgement of the market
is brought to bear on the conduct of states, while the social rights of citizenship (where they exist) are
pared back as provision through the market replaces provision directly or indirectly through the state"
(Hindess, 2000: 140). Hindess here takes his categories of social and political citizenship from the 1960s'
work of the English sociologist T.H. Marshall, and, while focusing on how social and political forms of
citizenship have been increasingly restricted and economically recoded in the subsequent years, he does
not reflect on how Marshall's third category of 'civil citizenship' might have changed rather differently.
As I have argued elsewhere (Sparke, 2004b), however, it is useful to reflect further on how the
economic recodings of this third form of citizenship have not only led to its increasing restriction to
entrepreneurial social classes, but also to its rescaling: a territorial rescaling, most notably, from the
scale of nationally-defined and territorially enclosed rights to the scale of transnationally-defined and
territorially open-ended rights. For Marshall 'social citizenship' was associated with the expansion of
equality rights in tandem with the development of the welfare state in the mid-twentieth century,
and 'political citizenship' was associated with the development of the public sphere, voting and other
sorts of political rights from the 19th through to the 20th century (Marshall, 1998). Prior to these
developments, his evolutionist account associated the earliest innovations in British national citizenship
with the growth of the 'civil citizenship' made up of such newly codified and legally protected rights as
mobility rights and rights to sell one's labor that developed in concert with the establishment of
bourgeois property rights in early capitalism.
 Critique Solves – Epistemology
Critique of the relationship between power and knowledge is key to real change
because under the regime of biopolitics selves are produced according to the acumen
of normalization.
Hamann 2009 [Trent, “Neoliberalism, Governmentality, and Ethics,” in Foucault Studies 6]
Whether neoliberalism will ultimately be viewed as having presented a radically new form of
governmentality or just a set of variations on classical liberalism, we can certainly recognize that there
are a number of characteristics in contemporary practices that are new in the history of
governmentality, a number of which I’ve al-ready discussed. Another one of these outstanding features
is the extent to which the imposition of market values has pushed towards the evisceration of any
autonomy that may previously have existed among economic, political, legal, and moral dis-courses,
institutions, and practices. Foucault notes, for example, that in the sixteenth century jurists were able to
posit the law in a critical relation to the reason of state in order to put a check on the sovereign power
of the king. By contrast, neoliberalism, at least in its most utopian formulations, is the dream of a
perfectly limitless (as op-posed perhaps to totalizing) and all-encompassing (as opposed to exclusionary
and normalizing) form of governance that would effectively rule out all challenge or op-position. This
seems to be the kind of thing that Margaret Thatcher was dreaming about when she claimed that there
is “no alternative”. Such formulations of what might be called “hyper-capitalism” seem to lend
themselves to certain traditional forms of criticism. However, critical analyses that produce a totalizing
conception of power and domination risk the same danger, noted above, of overlooking the some-times
subtle and complex formations of power and knowledge that can be revealed through genealogical
analyses of local practices. Important for any genealogical analysis is the recognition that, while there is
no ”outside” in relation to power, re-sistance and power are coterminous, fluid, and, except in
instances of domination, reversible. There is an echo of this formulation in Foucault’s understanding of
go-vernmentality as ”the conduct of conduct”. Governmentality is not a matter of a dominant force
having direct control over the conduct of individuals; rather, it is a matter of trying to determine the
conditions within or out of which individuals are able to freely conduct themselves. And we can see
how this is especially true in the case of neoliberalism insofar as it is society itself and not the individual
that is the direct object of power. Foucault provides examples of this in “The Subject and Pow-er”, in
which he discussed a number of struggles of resistance that have developed over the past few years
such as “opposition to the power of men over women, of parents over children, of psychiatry over the
mentally ill, of medicine over the popu-lation, of administration over the ways people live”. Despite
their diversity, these struggles were significant for Foucault because they share a set of common points
that allow us to recognize them as forms of resistance to governmentality, that is, ”critique”. Through
the examples he uses Foucault notes the local and immediate nature of resistance. These oppositional
struggles focus on the effects of power expe-rienced by those individuals who are immediately subject
to them. Despite the fact that these are local, anarchistic forms of resistance, Foucault points out that
they are not necessarily limited to one place but intersect with struggles going on elsewhere. Of
greatest importance is the fact that these struggles are critical responses to con-temporary forms of
governmentality, specifically the administrative techniques of subjectification used to shape
individuals in terms of their free conduct. These struggles question the status of the individual in
relation to community life, in terms of the forms of knowledge and instruments of judgment used to
determine the ”truth” of individuals, and in relation to the obfuscation of the real differences that make
individuals irreducibly individual beings. Tying all of these modes of resistance together is the question
“Who are we?” While some might be concerned about exactly who this we is suggested by Foucault,
both here and in his discussions of Kant and enlightenment, I think the question is in some ways its own
answer. In other words, it is meant to remain an ongoing critical question that can never be
definitively answered, or, as John Rajchman has sug-gested, it is a question that can only be answered
by those who ask it and through the process of asking it. In his introduction to The Politics of Truth he
writes: The ‘we’ always comes after, emerging only through the on-going light its activi-ties shed on the
habits and practices through which people come to govern themselves—and so see themselves and one
another. Indeed in this lies precisely the originality of the critical attitude, its singular sort of universality,
its distinc-tive relation to ‘today’—to ‘now’, ‘the present’, l’actuel. This ”critical attitude” that Foucault
repeatedly refers to in all of his discussions of Kant from the 1970’s and 1980’s is inseparable from both
his analysis of governmen-tality and his discussions of ethics and the history of the experience of the
relation-ship between the subject and truth. What fascinated Foucault about the ”care of the self” he
discovered in Greek and Roman ethics was the ”spiritual” relationship that existed between the subject
and truth. In order to gain access to the truth, that is, in order to acquire the ”right” to the truth,
individuals had to take care of themselves by engaging in certain self-transformative practices or
ascetic exercises. Here we find critical and resistant forms of subjectivation where, rather than
objectifying them-selves within a given discourse of power/knowledge, individuals engaged in prac-
tices of freedom that allowed them to engage in ethical parrhesia or speak truth to power. In
modernity, however, following what Foucault identified as ”the Cartesian moment” the principle ”take
care of yourself” has been replaced by the imperative to “know yourself” [THS, 1 - 24]. In contemporary
life that which gives an individual access to the truth is knowledge and knowledge alone, including
knowledge of one’s self. In this context knowledge of the self is not something produced through the
work individuals perform on themselves, rather it is something given through dis-ciplines such as
biology, medicine, and the social sciences. These modern forms of knowledge, of course, become
crucial to the emerging biopolitical forms of govern-mentality. Whereas individuals were once urged to
take care of themselves by using self-reflexive ethical techniques to give form to their freedom, modern
biopolitics ensures that individuals are already taken care of in terms of biological and econom-ic forms
of knowledge and practices. As Edward F. McGushin puts it in his book Foucault’s Askesis: An
Introduction to the Philosophical Life, Power functions by investing, defining, and caring for the body
understood as a bioeconomic entity. The operation of biopower is to define the freedom and truth of
the individual in economic and biological terms. Reason is given the task of comprehending the body in
these terms and setting the conditions within which it can be free. ...The formation of the disciplines
marks the moment where askesis itself was absorbed within biopolitics.

Epistemological critique produces new ways of understanding our complicity in

systems of biopolitical domination
Hamann 2009 [Trent, “Neoliberalism, Governmentality, and Ethics,” in Foucault Studies 6]
Foucault explicitly identified critique, not as a transcendental form of judgment that would subsume
particulars under a general rule, but as a specifically modern ”atti-tude” that can be traced historically
as the constant companion of pastoral power and governmentality. As Judith Butler points out in her
article “What is Critique? An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue”,39 critique is an attitude, distinct from
judgment, pre-cisely because it expresses a skeptical or questioning approach to the rules and ra-
tionalities that serve as the basis for judgment within a particular form of gover-nance. From its
earliest formations, Foucault tells us, the art of government has al-ways relied upon certain relations to
truth: truth as dogma, truth as an individualiz-ing knowledge of individuals, and truth as a reflective
technique comprising general rules, particular knowledge, precepts, methods of examination,
confessions, inter-views, etc. And while critique has at times played a role within the art of government
itself, as we’ve seen in the case of both liberalism and neoliberalism, it has also made possible what
Foucault calls “the art of not being governed, or better, the art of not being governed like that and at
that cost” (WC, 45). Critique is neither a form of ab-stract theoretical judgment nor a matter of
outright rejection or condemnation of specific forms of governance. Rather it is a practical and
agonistic engagement, re-engagement, or disengagement with the rationalities and practices that have
led one to become a certain kind of subject. In his essay “What is Enlightenment?” Foucault suggests
that this modern attitude is a voluntary choice made by certain people, a way of acting and behaving
that at one and the same time marks a relation of be-longing and presents itself as a task. Its task
amounts to a “historical investigation into the events that have led us to constitute ourselves and to
recognize ourselves as subjects of what we are doing, thinking, [and] saying” (WE, 125). But how can
we distinguish the kinds of resistance Foucault was interested in from the endless calls to ”do your own
thing” or ”be all you can be” that stream forth in every direction from political campaigns to commercial
advertising? How is it, to return to the last of the three concerns raised above, that Foucault does not
simply lend technical sup-port to neoliberal forms of subjectivation? On the one hand, we can
distinguish criti-cal acts of resistance and ethical self-fashioning from what Foucault called ”the Cali-
fornian cult of the self” (OGE, 245), that is, the fascination with techniques designed to assist in
discovering one’s ”true” or ”authentic” self, or the merely ”cosmetic” forms of rebellion served up for
daily consumption and enjoyment. On the other hand we might also be careful not to dismiss forms of
self-fashioning as ”merely” aesthetic. As Timothy O’Leary points out in his book Foucault and the Art of
Ethics, Foucault’s notion of an aesthetics of existence countered the modern conception of art as a
singular realm that is necessarily autonomous from the social, political, and ethical realms, at least as it
pertained to his question of why it is that a lamp or a house can be a work of art, but not a life. O’Leary
writes: Foucault is less interested in the critical power of art, than in the ‘artistic’ or ‘plas-tic’ power of
critique. For Foucault, not only do no special advantages accrue from the autonomy of the aesthetic, but
this autonomy unnecessarily restricts our possibilities for self-constitution. Hence, not only is Foucault
aware of the specif-ic nature of aesthetics after Kant, he is obviously hostile to it. What O’Leary rightly
identifies here is Foucault’s interest in an aesthetics of exis-tence that specifically stands in a critical but
immanent relation to the ways in which our individuality is given to us in advance through ordered
practices and forms of knowledge that determine the truth about us. The issue is not a matter of how
we might distinguish “authentic” forms of resistance (whatever that might mean) from “merely”
aesthetic ones. Rather it is a matter of investigating whether or not the practices we engage in either
reinforce or resist the manner in which our freedom—how we think, act, and speak—has been
governed in ways that are limiting and into-lerable. In short, critical resistance offers possibilities for
an experience of de-subjectification. Specifically in relation to neoliberal forms of governmentality, this
would involve resisting, avoiding, countering or opposing not only the ways in which we’ve been
encouraged to be little more than self-interested subjects of ra-tional choice (to the exclusion of other
ways of being and often at the expense of those “irresponsible” others who have “chosen” not to amass
adequate amounts of human capital), but also the ways in which our social environments, institutions,
communities, work places, and forms of political engagement have been reshaped in order to foster
the production of Homo economicus. Endless examples of this kind of work can be found in many
locations, from the international anti-globalization movement to local community organizing.

The endpoint of biopolitics is a nation where the citizens no longer perceive the
violence right in front of them—the critique’s reorientation around biopolitical
violence is the starting point for resistance
Fowler, Ph.D, Instructor at Washington State University, 2016 (Rebecca, “U.S. biopolitical Geographies
of the Migrant,” borderlands e-journal 15(1), GDI-JM)

Despite the plethora of devices immigrants use to evade detection, every day hundreds are entrapped
in geographies of arrest and are eventually detained and deported. In detention centers situated in
increasingly remote locations, migrants are ‘sealed off in tightly closed containers’ where walls, fences,
and geographic isolation serve to conceal migrant identities, alienating the undocumented from family,
friends, and legal support (Bauman, quoted in Mountz et al 2012, p. 528). For residents who live near
the immigrant detention centers, immigrants remain invisible even as the buildings and structures
themselves take on a shroud of invisibility. Six miles outside of Eloy, Arizona, the Eloy Detention Center
is, according to Mayor Byron Jackson, ‘ Out of sight, out of mind’ , while only 25 miles away, the Florence
Correctional Center remains invisible out in the open. Here in Florence, the town and its economy have
grown up around the cluster of detention structures, but many of the residents ‘pass by them
everyday’ and ‘don’t see them anymore’ . According to one resident, living next door to a detention
facility, ‘I don’t think of the building ... it is just like another mountain ... just gray matter’ (Doty and
Wheatley 2013, p. 438). Within the violent geography of deportation, the undocumented person is
made to literally vanish from the social landscape he or she once inhabited. In many instances, where
there was once a whole family unit, households are fragmented by the spectral absence of fathers,
mothers, husbands and/or wives. Once deported, the undocumented are permanently banished from
the United States in the form of a ten-year waiting period during which they are ineligible to petition to
adjust their legal status (Talavera et al 2010, p. 173). Many of these men and women become desperate
to reunite with their families in the U.S. and will risk their lives getting back to them crossing treacherous
geographies of desert and mountain terrain. Caught up in the wastelands of state-managed violence,
reduced to ‘the status of human litter on the world’s crossroads of death’, a countless number of
them are made to disappear (Doty 2007, p. 18).

Geography is depoliticized as an arsenal of power through privileging the science of

places as a refusal of all “knowledge of spaces”. Decrypting knowledge on reality is
key.
Brabant, a member of the Hérodote editorial staff, 2007 (Jean-Michel, Chapter 3, Space,
Knowledge and Power: Foucault and Geography, eds. Stuart Elden, Professor of Political Theory and
Geography and Jeremy Crampton, Ph.D The Pennsylvania State University, 2007, pg.s 26, EBSCO,
Accessed 7/6/18 GDI-JV)

The recognition of the scientific status of certain branches of knowledge is without doubt a way of
turning these branches of knowledge into a hierarchy, which is linked to power-status and a social
consensus, as well as being linked to a necessary disposition toward internal rigour. The place of
geography in this process is, without doubt, novel. Linked to power as strategic knowledge, geography
is simultaneously depoliticized and ‘scientified’. The establishment of this scientific status, essentially
through the institution of the university, has moved geography from the domain of strategic
knowledge to the rank of accessory to the ideological arsenal of power. This passage has been
reinforced (in the case of French geography) by the internal epistemological evolution that, while
privileging the science of places and not that of men, has refused all ‘knowledge of spaces’. This
‘knowledge of spaces’, obscured but in part nurtured by the ‘science’ of geography is, before all else, a
practice at the level of power and its expert advisors. The present problem consists neither in
criticizing geography on the basis of its internal epistemology, nor in putting in place a new science of
space (a new or renovated geography). Rather than placing ourselves on the level of scientific debate,
it suits us to decrypt a knowledge that operates on reality, and which one can attempt to grasp at the
level of practice.
 Critique Solves – Political Ontology
Politics is no longer a monopoly on legitimate violence but rather a control of
appearance—the role of the debate should be to “make appearance appear.”
Agamben 2000 [Giorgio, professor of philosophy at the College International de Philosophie in Paris,
Means Without End: Notes on Politics, p. 93-95]

Exposition is the location of politics. If there is no animal politics, that is perhaps because animals are
always already in the open and do not try to take possession of their own exposition; they simply live in
it without caring about it. That is why they are not interested in mirrors, in the image as image. Human
beings, on the other hand, separate images from things and give them a name precisely because they
want to recognize themselves, that is, they want to take possession of their own very ap pearance.
Human beings thus transform the open into a world, that is, into the battlefield of a political struggle
without quarter. This struggle, whose object is truth, goes by the name of History. It is happening more
and more often that in pornographic photographs the portrayed subjects, by a calculated stratagem,
look into the camera, thereby exhibiting the awareness of being exposed to the gaze. This unexpected
gesture violently belies the fiction that is implicit in the consumption of such images, according to which
the one who looks surprises the actors while remaining unseen by them: the latter, rather, knowingly
challenge the voyeur’s gaze and force him to look them in the eyes. In that precise moment, the
insubstantial nature of the human face suddenly comes to light. The fact that the actors look into the
camera means that they show that they are simulating; nevertheless, they paradoxically appear more
real precisely to the extent to which they exhibit this falsification. The same procedure is used today in
advertising: the image appears more convincing if it shows openly its own artifice. In both cases, the one
who looks is confronted with something that concerns unequivocally the essence of the face, the very
structure of truth. We may call tragicomedy of appearance the fact that the face uncovers only and
precisely inasmuch as it hides, and hides to the extent to which it uncovers. In this way, the appearance
that ought to have manifested human beings becomes for them instead a resemblance that betrays
them and in which they can no longer recognize themselves. Precisely because the face is solely the
location of truth, it is also and immediately the location of simulation and of an irreducible impropriety.
This does not mean, however, that appearance dissimulares what it uncovers by making it look like what
in reality it is not: rather, what human beings truly are is nothing other than this dissimulation and this
disquietude within the appearance. Because human beings neither are nor have to be any essence, any
nature, or any specific destiny, their condition is the most empty and the most insub stantial of all: it is
the truth. What remains hidden from them is not something behind appearance, but rather appearing
itself, that is, their being nothing other than a face. The task of politics is to return appearance itself to
appearance, to cause appearance itself to appear. The face, truth, and exposition are today the
objects of a global civil war, whose battlefield is social life in its en tirety, whose storm troopers are the
media, whose victims are all the peoples of the Earth. Politicians, the media establishment, and the
advertising industry have understood the insubstantial character of the face and of the community it
opens up, and thus they transform it into a miserable secret that they must make sure to control at all
costs. State power today is no longer founded on the monopoly of the legitimate use of violence — a
monopoly that states share increasingly willingly with other nonsovereign organizations such as the
United Nations and terrorist organizations; rather, it is founded above all on the control of
appearance (of doxa). The fact that politics constitutes itself as an autonomous sphere goes hand in
hand with the separation of the face in the world of spectacle — a world in which human
communication is being separated from itself. Exposition thus transforms itself into a value that is
accumulated in images and in the media, while a new class of bureaucrats jealously watches over its
management.

Sovereignty is a fragile sort of power—our refusal of the everyday practices of the

biopolitical sovereign underscores the dual nature of biopolitics
Gilberto Rosas, Associate Professor of Political Science, Washington University in St Louis, 2007,
“Fragile Ends of War,” Social Text 25 (2 (91)): 81-102. GDI John Melton

Yet the routine undermining of the border by the young people of Barrio Libre and other immigrants,
and its circumvention by other means, complicates the analysis of sovereignty at the border. Such
practices speak to the fragility of U.S. sovereign power, organized originally in warfare, in the
contemporary borderlands and the struggles against the right of the state to regulate passage through
its borders. Imperial, colonial, and neocolonial contexts, it must be remembered, develop biopolitical
technologies over aspects of life aside from death and violence. Too great an emphasis on manifestly
destructive technologies risks mischaracterizing the specificity of such forms of domination. In this
respect the border also resembles the plantation or work camp, to return to Mbembe’s formulation,
inasmuch as it not only enforces the power to torture or “let die” but also disproportionately involves
the deployment of biopower to discipline the vitality of laboring bodies. Many do die at the border. But,
many, many more struggle to live and work. For those immigrants who do survive, their treacherous
border cross- ings through the killing deserts, vigilante patrolled terrain, or transnational sewer
systems coercively inaugurate them to their imminent but not inevi- table disposability and
policeability, indicative of their preeminent social relation of illegality.24 Indeed, late in the 1990s
certain units of the Border Patrol were designed to render humanitarian aid to immigrants in the des-
erts, underscoring the tensions between the biopolitical and necropolitical technologies that are
inextricably and ideologically linked to U.S. empire, its contestations and negotiations.
 Alt = Moral
There is an ethical obligation to open borders because borders reinforce geographical
discrimination and domination.
Tabarrok, a professor of economics at George Mason University, 2015 (Alex, "The Case for
Getting Rid of Borders—Completely,” The Atlantic, 10/10/2015,
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/10/get-rid-borders-completely/409501/, accessed
7/2/18, GDI-JM)
No defensible moral framework regards foreigners as less deserving of rights than people born in the
right place at the right time. To paraphrase Rousseau, man is born free, yet everywhere he is caged.
Barbed-wire, concrete walls, and gun-toting guards confine people to the nation-state of their birth.
But why? The argument for open borders is both economic and moral. All people should be free to
move about the earth, uncaged by the arbitrary lines known as borders. Not every place in the world is
equally well-suited to mass economic activity. Nature’s bounty is divided unevenly. Variations in wealth
and income created by these differences are magnified by governments that suppress entrepreneurship
and promote religious intolerance, gender discrimination, or other bigotry. Closed borders compound
these injustices, cementing inequality into place and sentencing their victims to a life of penury. The
overwhelming majority of would-be immigrants want little more than to make a better life for
themselves and their families by moving to economic opportunity and participating in peaceful,
voluntary trade. But lawmakers and heads of state quash these dreams with state-sanctioned violence
—forced repatriation, involuntary detention, or worse—often while paying lip service to “huddled
masses yearning to breathe free.” Wage differences are a revealing metric of border discrimination.
When a worker from a poorer country moves to a richer one, her wages might double, triple, or rise
even tenfold. These extreme wage differences reflect restrictions as stifling as the laws that separated
white and black South Africans at the height of Apartheid. Geographical differences in wages also signal
opportunity—for financially empowering the migrants, of course, but also for increasing total world
output. On the other side of discrimination lies untapped potential. Economists have estimated that a
world of open borders would double world GDP. Even relatively small increases in immigration flows
can have enormous benefits. If the developed world were to take in enough immigrants to enlarge its
labor force by a mere one percent, it is estimated that the additional economic value created would
be worth more to the migrants than all of the world’s official foreign aid combined. Immigration is the
greatest anti-poverty program ever devised. And while the benefits of cross-border movements are
tremendous for the immigrants, they are also significant for those born in destination countries.
Immigration unleashes economic forces that raise real wages throughout an economy. New immigrants
possess skills different from those of their hosts, and these differences enable workers in both groups
to better exploit their special talents and leverage their comparative advantages. The effect is to
improve the welfare of newcomers and natives alike. The immigrant who mows the lawn of the nuclear
physicist indirectly helps to unlock the secrets of the universe. What moral theory justifies using wire,
wall, and weapon to prevent people from moving to opportunity? What moral theory justifies using
tools of exclusion to prevent people from exercising their right to vote with their feet? No standard
moral framework, be it utilitarian, libertarian, egalitarian, Rawlsian, Christian, or any other well-
developed perspective, regards people from foreign lands as less entitled to exercise their rights—or as
inherently possessing less moral worth—than people lucky to have been born in the right place at the
right time. Nationalism, of course, discounts the rights, interests, and moral value of “the Other, but
this disposition is inconsistent with our fundamental moral teachings and beliefs. Freedom of
movement is a basic human right. Thus the Universal Declaration of Human Rights belies its name when
it proclaims this right only “within the borders of each state.” Human rights do not stop at the
border.Today, we treat as pariahs those governments that refuse to let their people exit. I look forward
to the day when we treat as pariahs those governments that refuse to let people enter. Is there hope for
the future? Closed borders are one of the world’s greatest moral failings but the opening of borders is
the world’s greatest economic opportunity. The grandest moral revolutions in history—the abolition
of slavery, the securing of religious freedom, the recognition of the rights of women—yielded a world
in which virtually everyone was better off. They also demonstrated that the fears that had
perpetuated these injustices were unfounded. Similarly, a planet unscarred by iron curtains is not only
a world of greater equality and justice. It is a world unafraid of itself.
2nc a2’s
A/T: Permutations
 Accomodation
Sovereignty is the ability to decide both what does and does not belong—including
the critique in their politics via the perm is the epitome of sovereign decision
Decoteau 2008 [Claire, “The Bio-Politics of HIV/AIDS in Post-Apartheid South Africa” at South Africa”
at http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/61711/1/cdecotea_1.pdf]

Although Mbembe is describing the colonial world, the post-colonial political space is also
heteronymously organized. Third, states still exercise juridical control. According to Malcolm Bull, by
suggesting that states are always ‘in exception,’ Agamben disavows normalized state violence, which
can be exercised not only non-juridically but juridically (2004). Bull also notes that while states have not
relinquished their monopoly on violence, the ‘exception’ is a site of struggle, or at least a product of it.
“Agamben gives little indication that the state of exception is usually only one side of a social
confrontation, or that, rather than creating a void in the law, the exception is often made in an attempt
to close a space opened up by someone else … it is not the state of exception itself that carries the
power of real life so much as the crisis with which it attempts to deal, or the crisis that it provokes” (Bull
2004: 6; my emphasis). The ability to revise existing norms (through legal or social frameworks) is
essential to state-making because reformation allows state power to be renewed (Bull 2004). Both
Bull and Jean Comaroff (2007) insist that Agamben’s disavowal of “constituent power”198 is misplaced
(see Agamben 2003: 34-36). Constituent power can use the law, and is therefore not extra-juridical
(Bull), and can also be biopolitical (Comaroff). Bare life is not the only entity against which sovereign
power acts. It still engages in governmentality and because of this and because sovereignty is
decentralized, it is a site of struggle and resistance. Finally, and this is a point to which I will return in
the next chapter, agency becomes completely impossible within Agamben’s zone of indistinction.
However, Comaroff points out that exclusion also leads to the production of new political subjectivities
(2007: 211). Several theorists have suggested that the squatter camps of the Third World are the spaces
of exception under a neoliberal world order (Biehl 2001 and 2005; See also Scheper-Huges and Bourgois
2004; Inda 2005). I will argue that in order to protect the “nation’s biological body” (Agamben 1998:
142) from moral, economic and physical contagion – from undisciplinarity, those in South Africa’s
informal settlements have become the target of thanatopolitics. “[S]overeignty means the capacity to
define who matters and who does not, who is disposable and who is not” (Mbembe 2003: 27). The
government relegates those who are dispensable, those who fail to “produce, work and consume”
(Foucault 2000b) and who represent a “biological danger to others” (Foucault 1978/1990) to “zones of
abandonment” (Biehl 2001 and 2005), on the outskirts of the city, on the margins of the body politic.

The permutation is the status quo: the uniqueness question is implicated by 2400
years of biopolitical control of life. Until a completely new political relation between
life and biopolitics can be articulated, the affirmative can only reproduce the violences
of the status quo.
Agamben 1998 [Giorgio, professor of philosophy at the University of Verona, Homo Sacer, pg. 11]
In contrasting the “beautiful day” (euemeria) of simple life with the “great difficulty” of political bios
in the passage cited above, Aristotle may well have given the most beautiful formulation to the aporia
that lies at the foundation of Western politics. The 24 centuries that have since gone by have brought
only provisional and ineffective solutions. In carrying out the metaphysical task that has led it more and
more to assume the form of a biopolitics, Western politics has not succeeded in constructing the link
between zoe and bios, between voice and language, that would have healed the fracture . Bare life
remains included in politics in the form of the exception, that is, as something that is included solely
through an exclusion. How is it possible to “politicize” the “natural sweetness” of zoe? And first of all,
does zoe really need to be politicized, or is politics not already contained in zoe as its most precious
center? The biopolitics of both modern totalitarianism and the society of mass hedonism and
consumerism certainly constitute answers to these questions. Nevertheless, until a com pletely new
politics—that is, a politics no longer founded on the exception of bare life—is at hand, every theory
and every praxis will remain imprisoned and immobile, and the “beautiful day” of life will be given
citizenship only either through blood and death or in the perfect senselessness to which the society of
the spectacle condemns it.

The permutation guarantees the legitimacy of sovereignty because it invests their

politics with the ability to decide what does and does not belong within their
conception of biopolitics
Agamben 1998 [Giorgio, Homo Sacer, pp. 15-17]
The topology implicit in the paradox is worth reflecting upon, since the degree to which sovereignty
marks the limit (in the dou¬ble sense of end and principle) of the juridical order will become clear only
once the structure of the paradox is grasped. Schmitt pre¬sents this structure as the structure of the
exception (Ausnahme): “The exception is that which cannot be subsumed; it defies general
codification, but it simultaneously reveals a specifically juridical formal element: the decision in
absolute purity. The exception appears in its absolute form when it is a question of creating a
situation in which juridical rules can be valid. Every general rule demands a regular everyday frame of
life to which it can be factually applied and which is submitted to its regulations. The rule requires a
homogeneous medium. This factual regularity is not merely an “external presupposition” that the
jurist can ignore; it belongs, rather, to the rule’s imminent validity. There is no rule that is applicable to
chaos. Order must be established for juridical order to make sense. A regular situation must be created,
and sovereign is he who definitely decides if this situation is actually effective. All law is “situational
law.” The sovereign creates and guarantees the situation as a whole in its totality. He has the
monopoly over the final decision. Therein consists the essence of Stare sovereignty, which must
therefore be properly juridically defined nor as the monopoly to sanction or to rule hut as the monopoly
to decide, where the word “monopoly” is used in a general sense that is still to be developed. The
decision reveals the essence of State author¬ity most clearly. Here the decision must be distinguished
from the juridical regulation, and (to formulate it paradoxically) authority proves itself not to need law
to create law. . . . The exception is more interesting than the regular case. The latter proves nothing;
the exception proves everything. The exception does not only confirm the rule; the rule as such lives
off the exception alone. A Protestant theologian who demonstrated the vital intensity of which
theological reflection was still capable in the nineteenth century said: “The exception explains the
general and itself And when one really wants to study the general. one need only look around For a
real exception. It brings everything to light more clearly than the general itself After a while, one
becomes disgusted with the endless talk about the general—there are exceptions. If they cannot be
explained, then neither can the general be explained. Usually the difficulty is not noticed, since the
general is thought about not with passion but only with comfortable superficiality. The exception, on
the other hand, thinks the general with intense passion.” (Polithche Theologie. pp. 19—22)” It is not by
chance that in defining the exception Schmitt refers to the work of a theologian (who is none other than
Soren Kierkegaard). Giambattista Vico had, to be sure, affirmed the superiority of the exception, which
he called “the ultimate configuration of facts,” over positive law in a way which was not so dissimilar:
“An esteemed jurist is, therefore, not someone who, with the help of a good memory, masters
positive law [or the general complex of laws], hut rather someone who, with sharp judgment, knows
how to look into cases and see the ultimate circumstances of facts that merit equitable consideration
and exceptions from general rules” (De antiquissima, chap. 2). Yet nowhere in the realm of the juridical
sciences can one find a theory that grants such a high position to the exception. For what is at issue in
the sovereign exception is, according to Schmitt, the very condition of possibility of juridical rule and,
along with it, the very meaning of State authority. Through the state of exception, the sovereign
“creates and guarantees the situation” that the law needs for its own validity. But what is this
‘‘situation,’’ what is its structure, such that it consists in nothing other than the suspension of the rule?
 Complicity
The permutation doesn’t solve. Even if they have some incremental change, the
violence that they are complicit in is too great to overlook
Fowler, Ph.D, Instructor at Washington State University, 2016 (Rebecca, “U.S. biopolitical Geographies
of the Migrant,” borderlands e-journal 15(1), GDI-JM)

The intensification of the militarized policing of immigrants in the U.S./Mexico borderlands and
Operation Gatekeeper strategies have deliberately worked to produce a funneling effect as many
thousands of undocumented immigrants are deterred from traditional crossing areas near urban
centers into the treacherous geographies of deadly desert and mountain environs. According to
Gilberto Rosas (2006, p. 402), deterrence technologies function as ‘managed forms of violence’ in their
underlying intent to inflict injury in the guise of prevention. While Stephanie Lawrence and John
Wildgen (2012, p. 483) allow that undocumented migrants ‘[are] guided toward the Sonoran Desert,
which is surrounded by mountains with igneous intrusions honed almost to razor blades that render
them impossible as travel routes’, they do not view the funneling effect as a design to ‘kill UBCs’
[undocumented border crossers]. Other scholars aptly observe that the policy of ‘prevention through
deterrence’ is ‘in reality, a death sentence’ (Chacón and Davis 2006, p. 205). While clandestinely
crossing the border from Mexico into the U.S. has always been a dangerous enterprise, since 1994, over
6,000 people have died crossing (Alto Arizona 2011), but no one knows the true number of persons who
have disappeared in the desert. It is estimated that for every set of human remains recovered in the
desert, three to ten more are never found. In his work, Justin Akers Chacón has contextualized deaths
on the U.S./Mexico border, juxtaposing the higher numbers of people who died there to that of persons
who perished in the World Trade Center attacks (p. 205). To view border deaths in another context,
their number is forty times that of people who died attempting to climb over the Berlin Wall during
the Cold War. But Chacón observes that, far from being viewed as a travesty, border militarization ‘is a
success from the point of view of policy-makers. It has strengthened control over immigrant labor,
provided political capital in the ‘War on Terror’, and is, in itself, a profitable institution, as defense
contractors compete to corner the merging market on border enforcement’ (p. 205, emphasis in the
original). Former INS chief Doris Meisner, who oversaw the initial implementation of the Operation Hold
the Line strategies has admitted, ‘We did believe geography would be an ally’. Another INS official has
been quoted in the San Diego Times stating, ‘Eventually, we’d like to see them all out in the desert’
(Smith, quoted in Chacón, 207). What becomes crystal clear is that from its inception, gatekeeper
militarization strategies were grounded in the most basic level of biopolitics in the knowledge of the
human body and ‘its need for water and [the horror that] happens when it has none’ (Doty 2007, p.
16). Deterrence strategies rested on both the understanding and expectation that migrants would keep
coming, and because of the treacherous nature of the geographical terrain they were being forced to
venture into, many people would die doing it.
 Cooption
the perm fails – alt is coopted and controlled by the sovereign
Anssi Paasi, Academy of Finland, 1-1-2012, "Border Studies Reanimated: Going beyond the
Territorial/Relational Divide," Environment and Planning A, Volume 44
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1068/a45282 - GDI John Melton

Much current spatial thinking emphasizes the porousness of borders, the hybridity of cultures, and
nonessential identities. While these are often related to mobility and to the rise of transnational flows,
it is important not to essentialize such views or to isolate them from contexts and practices. Firstly,
‘flows’ are typically monitored and controlled—governing institutions are thus ‘border producing’ and
‘reproducing’ (Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero, 2008). Secondly, despite the rise of transnational processes
and claims for a postnational/ denationalized citizenship (Sassen, 2002), the practices of states in
foreign policy, securi- tization (military, political, economic, environmental), spatial planning,
policymaking and national socialization still operate in the world of ‘spatialized essences’ (Agnew,
2009; Thompson, 2004). Jones (2009) argues that “ When performing their practical politics, agents
imagine and identify a discrete, bounded space characterized by a shared understanding of the
opportunities or problems that are motivating the very nature of political action.” Similarly the
expanding ‘securitization complex’ suggests that borders are best understood as processes that are
related to circulation and technologies. Graham (2010, page 89) has proposed that “states are
becoming internationally organized systems geared towards trying to separate people and circulations
deemed risky or malign from those deemed risk-free or worthy of protection.” This ‘separation’
process occurs both inside and outside of state territorial borders and, indeed, results in a blurring
between international and urban/local borders, thus also fusing the scalar dimensions of borders
(page 89). To follow the Simmelian (1997) metaphor, instead of bridges, there are doors that are opened
selectively.

Perm fails - Focusing on individual groups opens up the alternative to cooption

Fowler, Ph.D, Instructor at Washington State University, 2016 (Rebecca, “U.S. biopolitical Geographies
of the Migrant,” borderlands e-journal 15(1), GDI-JM)

Yet race as a diffused form of governance proves ultimately unstable, contingent, reversible. These
dynamics are embodied in the daily struggles of the young people of Barrio Libre, who would often
exploit the tunnel in Nogales, Arizona, and then stow away on trains or walk some sixty miles in order
to reach the Mexican neighborhood of Tucson, Arizona, that also is called Barrio Libre. Historically this
latter Barrio Libre is an immigrant community of working-class Mexicans.28 The area’s name comes
from the one-time absence of policing; as the community was formed, the Tucson police department
would not patrol it.29 In this and other parts of the shift- ing borderlands of the United States, the young
people of Barrio Libre exploit their resemblance to U.S. citizens of Mexican descent, sometimes
blending in with the local Mexican population. As Roman explained: “If I dress right, and wear
baggy clothes, the Border Patrol thinks I’m Chicano.” The cultural and racial resemblances between
U.S. citizens of Mexican descent and the undocumented immigrants render dress a key marker of
belonging to the Free ’Hood. Those clothes most prized were those signifying either participation or
transnational identification with Chicanos in the United States, such as baggy pants and T-shirts
proclaim- ing “Chicano style,” “Chicano Power,” “Brown Pride,” and the like. These and similar
practices disrupt theorizations of race as solely phenotypical and reveal the relational and ultimately
political nature of racism as a form of governmentality.30 The knowledge that certain cultural
practices, such as forms of dress or speaking the dominant language, are resources that subvert
relations of illegality reveals the dynamism and reversibility of racial governance, even among such a
marginalized population.

The permutation includes a conception of life and action wedded to a scientistic

biopolitical understanding of life; we must understand that there is no Archimedian
point outside biopolitics, so we must transform our relationship to it. Remember,
their net-benefit is their case impact—the saving of lives. But in appealing to political
life as the justification for the permutation, they demand that we understand the
permutation through a biopolitical framework.
Norris 2005 [Andrew, assistant professor of political science at the university of Pennsylvania, Politics,
Metaphysics, and Death: Essays On Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer, pg. 14-15]

Finally, the liberal strategy reveals its limitations when we recognize that the notion of the threshold
is in fact expanding into areas where we will not have the luxury of refusing to consider the inner logic
of phenomena we should like to reject as evil and incomprehensible. What, for instance, are we to do
when we are dealing with agents or things that have not already been recognized as the bearers of
rights? Here the reassertion of rights is simply not an option. We must decide whether a neomort—a
body whose only signs of life are that it is “warm, pulsating, and urinating”—is in fact a human being
at all, an agent or a thing. In such cases, “life and death [cease to be] properly scientific concepts [and
become] political concepts, which as such acquire a political meaning precisely only through a
decision” (164). Ironically, such decisions are increasingly made by scientists, and not by politi cians:
“In the biopolitical horizon that characterizes modernity, the physician and the scientist move into the
no-man’s-land into which at one point the sovereign alone could penetrate” (159). These are still
marginal figures in our current political life. But if Agamben is right, the concept of the margin is itself
being swept away. It is this that leads him to conclude that the camp is the as yet unrecognized
paradigm of the modern. As the logic of the sovereign exception comes unraveled (or is realized—this
paradox being a necessary function of that logic), and the impossibility of categorically distinguishing
between exception and rule is made manifest, the distinction between bare life and political life is
hopelessly confused. “When life and politics—originally divided, and linked together by means of the
no-man’s-land of the state of exception that is inhabited by bare life—begin to become one, all life
becomes sacred and all politics becomes the exception” (I48)~~ In the end, the attempt to resist this
through the assertion of human rights ignores the connection between the humanism that undergirds
the concept of rights and the events that seem to conflict with it. Agamben’s argument is not that
Aristotle’s or Locke’s reflections on politics carry with them an implicit commitment to the substantive
racist policies of National Socialism; nor does he claim that they “caused” the Holocaust (a term to
which he objects [114]). What he does argue is that there is a deep affinity between such
contemporary horrors and the tradition of political philosophy to which we might turn in an effort to
understand and combat such phenomena. The practical implication would be not that there is no
difference between Aristotle or Hitler, but that Aristotle will not provide a stable point from which to
critique those who follow after him, or from which to construct an alternative.~~ There is no
Archimedean point outside biopolitics. Politics is always a matter of the body, and “the ‘body’ is
always already a biopolitical body” (187).
 Intelligibility
The permutation gets a net-benefit because it reduces political action to the
machinations of state actors. Small victories like the permutation only provide a more
dreadful foundation for the sovereign power from which we would free ourselves.
Burke 2005 [Anthony, Beyond Security pp. 8-9]
Agamben, drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault, has done most to describe and
denounce the violent and impoverished conceptualisation of life implicit in such a politics. He saw in the
convergence of a Schmittian theory of sovereignty and what Foucault termed `biopolitics' a diabolical
system of political and administrative power that reduced human existence to 'bare life' (Homo sacer)
that 'may be killed and yet not sacrificed' – Homo sacer being 'an obscure figure of archaic Roman law in
which human life is included in the juridical order solely in the form of its exclusion (that is, of its
capacity to be killed)'.18 He sees such a simultaneously exceptional and biopolitical power at work in
`the Camp', which took on its most horrific form in the Holocaust but is also in operation at the US
prisons in Cuba and Abu Ghraib, and, as Suvendrini Perera19 has shown, at immigration detention
centres like Woomera and Baxter in remote South Australia, where sovereign power is unchecked and
life is taken hold of outside the existing legal order (or at least within a radically unstable and arbitrary
one). The camp, Agamaben argues, is 'the biopolitical paradigm of the modern' and the state of
exception is becoming normalised and universalised: it 'tends increasingly to appear as the dominant
paradigm of government in contemporary politics'.20 Agamben thus issues a profound warning for
anyone concerned with interrogating modern conceptions of security – which, after all, posit the
sovereign nation-state as the collective to be secured and abrogate to government powers to protect
the 'life' of this collective. Yet life is not valued equally and its 'protection' comes with a simultaneous
seizing of life by power: . . . in the age of biopolitics this power [to decide which life can be killed]
becomes emancipated from the state of exception and trans formed into the power to decide the
point at which life ceases to be politically relevant. When life becomes the supreme political value,
not only is the problem of life's nonvalue thereby posed as Schmitt suggests, but further, it is as if the
ultimate ground of sovereign power were at stake in this decision. In modern biopolitics, sovereign is
he who decides on the value or nonvalue of life as such.21In a world where life and existence are
defined biopolitically, and government takes on the responsibility to secure, enable, regulate and
order life, Agamben argues (after Foucault) that it is as if: 'every decisive political event were double-
sided: the spaces, the liberties, and the rights won by individuals in their conflicts with central powers
always simultaneously prepared a tacit but increasing inscription of individuals' lives within the state
order, thus offering a new more dreadful foundation for the sovereign power from which they wanted
to free themselves.'22 In this light, the 'active defense of the American people' comes to sound sinister
indeed, for Americans and their Others alike.

The permutation is possible only because the political and ethical assumptions about
life which render the affirmative a coherent normative imperative simultaneously
renders the critique unintelligible and therefore compatible with anything.
Burke 2005 [Anthony, Beyond Security pp. 3-4]
It is clear that traditionally coercive and violent approaches to security and strategy are both still
culturally dominant, and politically and ethically suspect. However, the reasons for pursuing a critical
analysis relate not only to the most destructive or controversial approaches, such as the war in Iraq,
but also to their available (and generally preferable) alternatives. There is a necessity to question not
merely extremist versions such as the Bush doctrine, Indonesian militarism or Israeli expansionism, but
also their mainstream critiques – whether they take the form of liberal policy approaches in
international relations (IR), just war theory, US realism, optimistic accounts of globalisation, rhetorics of
sensitivity to cultural difference, or centrist Israeli security discourses based on territorial compromise
with the Palestinians. The surface appearance of lively (and often significant) debate masks a deeper
agreement about major concepts, forms of political identity and the imperative to secure them.
Debates about when and how it may be effective and legitimate to use military force in tandem with
other policy options, for example, mask a more fundamental discursive consensus about the meaning
of security, the effectiveness of strategic power, the nature of progress, the value of freedom or the
promises of national and cultural identity. As a result, political and intellectual debate about
insecurity, violent conflict and global injustice can become hostage to a claustrophobic structure of
political and ethical possibility that systematically wards off critique. <p3-4>
 Masking
The permutation is just a strategy for the affirmative to meet state enforcement goals
without being explicitly bound by the constraints of domestic justice
Sager, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Portland State University, 2017 (Alex, “Immigration
Enforcement and Domination: An Indirect Argument for Much More Open Borders,” Political Research
Quarterly,Vol. 70, Iss. 1, March, Proquest, Accessed 7/4/18 GDI-GN)

It is important not to be misled by the specific (and often unpleasant) activities that may be involved in
enforcing a regime of border control. We see people being bundled on to airplanes to take them back
to their country of origin, or small boats being turned around on the high seas and forced back to their point of departure. These
actions are indeed coercive: putting somebody into handcuffs and frog-marching them on to a plane
bound for Tehran, say, is an act of coercion. Even if [Miller (2010], 112) is able to sustain this separation
between border controls themselves--"the act of preventing somebody from entering a specific territory without
authorization"--this does not absolve us of morally scrutinizing these coercive practices in their own right.
At most, Miller shows that potential migrants who never attempt to migrate are not subject to
domination (because they are not subject to coercion). Notably, this does not even exclude migrants who apply for
admission from abroad as they are subjected to potentially arbitrary discretion. A second response is to
insist that it is possible to create just enforcement practices that overcome dispersion , externalization,
and privatization, but nonetheless permit significant scope in restricting migration . As I have argued
above, I doubt this is possible. First, dispersion, externalization, and privatization are partly strategies
for states to meet enforcement goals without being explicitly bound by the constraints of domestic justice. The
enlistment of transit states in migration enforcement is based in part on these states' willingness to use measures--for example, not allowing
asylum seekers a fair hearing to determine credible fear of persecution--that would be considered immoral and/or illegal in many receiving
states. The
choice to employ private actors in immigration enforcement is not simply driven by
considerations of economic efficiency (indeed it is questionable whether this reduces costs). Rather, it allows states to
more easily turn a blind eye to abuse and to avoid responsibility for wrongdoing.

Migrant domination stimulates violence, exclusion, halfway legal and administrative

reforms fail due to continued exclusion and inequality
Sager, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Portland State University, 2017 (Alex, “Immigration
Enforcement and Domination: An Indirect Argument for Much More Open Borders,” Political Research
Quarterly,Vol. 70, Iss. 1, March, Proquest, Accessed 7/4/18 GDI-GN)

The result of migrant vulnerability combined with these processes of dispersion, externalization, and
privatization is that people caught in the clutches of immigration enforcement face often
insurmountable legal, political, psychological, social, epistemic, and even metaphysical obstacles to
contesting and shaping life-altering decisions. Coercive regimes curtail their movement, frustrate their needs, and
expose them to violence. As they are denied the opportunity to respond, they become victims of
bureaucratic domination.[16] Let us return to some of Honohan's recommendations of mechanisms to reduce domination
above. First, she suggests establishing migrants' legal status . Second, she calls for moral accountability from
institutions determining migration law and policies by introducing a higher regulatory authority. Third, she calls for making
migration laws and policies contestable by those subject to them ([Honohan 2014]). Here we can imagine a combination of
legal oversight and democratic measures, including support from informal political channels and civil society. These are commendable reforms
and may very well help reduce domination along some dimensions. We should keep in mind that domination is not all or nothing, but rather a
matter of degree and that we should celebrate any attempts to make discretion less arbitrary, particularly when agents have the power to
deprive people of their freedom, deport them, or otherwise take decisions that radically alter quality of life (e.g., by keeping families apart). In
the case of Boubacar Bah, we can imagine an alternative scenario where he had been allowed to fight his deportation in the community, rather
than the Elizabeth Detention Center. We can certainly advocate for oversight within detention facilities that would have made it more likely for
him to have received adequate medical care in time and possibly prevented his skull injury altogether. More ambitiously, we could hope for
more generous policies that would have made it easier for him to legalize his status. Onething to notice about these proposals
is that they are all legal or administrative measures . As important as these measures are, migrants may be
practically unable to take advantage of formal measures to regularize their immigration status,
increase oversight, and create mechanisms to contest policies due to their own linguistic and
epistemic barriers and to bias and ignorance on the part of people charged to oversee them. Migrants
are prone to domination because their low status, lack of political and (often) economic power , poses
obstacles to reform. Many people view migrants' unequal status as legitimate, holding that their interests do
not merit equal consideration. For these reasons, arbitrary discretion and domination will be widespread in
immigration administration and enforcement without structural changes enabling people to achieve
equal status.[17] A further problem is that our ability to reduce arbitrary discretion depends on our
ability to identify the agents exercising discretion and to exercise oversight and control over them. When
immigration enforcement is externalized and dispersed this becomes increasingly difficult. Indeed,
this is a major reason why states have pursued these forms of enforcement: they curtail migration
through measures that domestic law and (possibly) public opinion would reject if they were carried
out directly by state actors and they allow states to abjure responsibility . The trend toward the privatization of
enforcement raises epistemic and practical barriers to democratic and legal oversight. When other sovereign states take on
enforcement activities for receiving states, barriers become even greater.[18]
 Mutual Exclusivity
The permutation re-inscribes the logic of sovereign power because it assumes the
same form of power relation between sovereignty and bare life
Edkins 2004 [Jenny, Sovereign Lives: Power in Global Politics, pp. 11-12]
One potential form of resistance to sovereign power consists of a refusal to draw any lines between
zoe and bios, inside and outside, human and inhuman. As we have shown, sovereign power does not
involve a power relation in Foucauldian terms. It is more appropriately considered to have become a
form of governance or technique of administration though relationships of violence that reduce
political subjects to mere bare or naked life. As Michael Dillon puts it, "Sovereign power [is] a form of
rule gone global [that] has come to develop and deploy modes of destruction whose dissemination it
finds increasingly impossible to control because these have become integral to its propagation and
survival." In asking far a refusal to draw lines as a possibility of resistance, then, we are not asking for
the elimination of power relations and, consequently, we are not asking for the erasure of the
possibility of a mode of political being that is empowered and empowering, is free and that speaks:
quite the opposite. Following Agamben, we are suggesting that it is only through a refusal to draw any
lines at all (and, indeed, nothing less will do) that sovereign power (as a form of violence) can be
contested and a properly political power relation can be reinstated. We could call this escaping the
logic of sovereign power. Our overall argument is that we can escape sovereign power and reinstate a
form of power relation by contesting its assumption of the right to draw lines, that is, by contesting
the sovereign ban. Any other resistance always inevitably remains within this relationship of violence.
To move outside it (and return to a power relation), we need not only contest its right to draw lines in
particular places, but also resist the call to draw any lines of the sort sovereign power demands.
 Parrhesia
Everything must be risked in the face of biopolitics: the permutation is the “safe word”
which secures us against political missteps and miscalculations, but the only way to
forge an ethical relationship to ourselves and others is to think the Truth of critique.
Milchman and Rosenberg 2005 [Alan and Alan, “Michel Foucault: Crises and Problematizations,” The
Review of Politics 67]

It is just such a problemization, we believe that sent the final Foucault on his “journey to Greece.” The
spatial/temporal setting for Foucault’s Berkeley lecture course, published as Fearless Speech, is far
removed from the setting of his lecture on governmentality, and the glosses that Dean and Rose have
provided. In Fearless Speech, Foucault’s focus is on the ancient world, from the Athens of Socrates to
the imperial Rome of Seneca. Foucault’s interest in the ancient world was not motivated by a conviction
that he could find there a solution to the problems of modernity. Indeed, far from romanticizing the
ancient world, Foucault pointed to the existence of slavery and misogyny, as well as rigid class
hierarchies, to make it clear that Greco-Roman antiquity was not the answer to the cultural and political
crises of modernity. What Foucault did find in the ancient world, however, was an emphasis on self-
fashioning, on truth-telling, and on friendship, that – beyond the prevailing class and gender
hierarchies – seemed to contain possibilities for meeting the challenge of contemporary crises and
problemizations. In what ways could one re-function the ancient concern with self-fashioning and
parrhesia so that it could be meaningful in a world shaped by biopower? Foucault contrasts parrhesia as
truth-telling with the modern conception of truth, with its basis in Descartes, as certitude or
indubitableness based on the possession of the correct method. The moral character of the one who
pursues the truth is irrelevant in a Cartesian world, where access to Truth is a function of method. By
contrast, “In the Greek conception of parrhesia … truth-having is guaranteed by the possession of
certain moral qualities: when someone has certain moral qualities, then that is the proof that he has
access to truth – and vice versa. The “parrhesiastic game” presupposes that the parrhesiastes [the
truth-teller] is someone who has the moral qualities, which are required, first to know the truth, and
secondly, to convey such truth to others” (p. 15). Chief among those qualities is courage: “The fact that
a speaker says something dangerous – different from what the majority believes – is a strong indiction
that he is a parrhesiastes” (p. 15). Foucault distinguishes between political and ethical parrhesia, both
of which are characterized by risk or danger for the parrhesiastes. In fourth century B.C. Athens, the
parrhesiastes was the citizen who dared to speak truth to the Assembly, who risked the displeasure
and ire of his fellow citizens in his resource to democratic parrhesia. In the Hellenistic monarchies,
when the parrhesiastes, typically a philosopher or advisor to the ruler, “addresses himself to a
sovereign, to a tyrant, and tells him that his tyranny is disturbing and unpleasant because tyranny is
incompatible with justice, then the philosopher speaks the truth, believes he is speaking the truth,
and more than that, also takes a risk (since the tyrant may become angry, may punish him, may exile,
may kill him)” (p. 16). But speaking truth to power, political parrhesia, also entails a rapport a soi, an
ethical relationship to oneself. “When you accept the parrhesiastic game in which your own life is
exposed, you are taking up a specific relationship to yourself: you risk death to tell the truth instead of
reposing in the security of a life where the truth goes unspoken. Of course, the threat of death comes
from the Other, and thereby requires a relationship to the Other. But the parrhesiastes primarily
chooses a relationship to himself: he prefers himself as a truth-teller rather than as a living being who
is false to himself” (p. 17). It is precisely the ancient focus on the person as truth-teller, in contrast to
the modern focus on possession of the Truth, that Foucault seeks to re-function in his own
problemization of the modern subject. For Foucault, it is Socrates who embodies ethical or
philosophical parrhesia in the form of philosophy as a way of life, inasmuch as the aim of his truth-
telling “is not to persuade the Assembly, but to convince someone that he must take care of himself
and of others; and this means that he must change his life. This theme of changing one’s life, of
conversion, becomes very important from the fourth century B.C. to the beginnings of Christianity. It is
essential to philosophical parrhesiastic practices.” Conversion here is not a religious experience, a
revelation of the divine; it is, rather, a transfiguration of “one’s style of life, one’s relation to others,
and one’s relation to oneself” (p. 106). For Socrates, it enables him to fulfill the basanic role, and to
forge a link between logos and bios (life).
 Reinscription
The permutation reinscribes governmentality into the alternative because it attempts
to manage the more “dangerous” and “radical” parts of the critique
Dean 2002 [Mitchell, “Powers of Life and Death Beyond Governmentality,” in Cultural Values
8/28/2002]

One suspects that the emphasis on liberal governmentality, and its powers of freedom, might
reproduce the view that liberal-democratic forms of rule offer safeguards against aspects of sovereign
and biopolitical powers of life and death. In this regard, there is a risk of narrowing the relationship
between the normativity of a liberal conception of government and governmentality studies. My view
is that we must be careful that our analyses of contemporary government do not amount to a soft
endorsement of the normative claims of contemporary liberal democratic forms of rule. We must be
careful of the assumption that liberal-democracy and notions of individual and even human rights offer
a prophylaxis against the less savoury aspects of biopolitics or of sovereign powers. The following
arguments should be sufficient to show why. This is connected to another possible danger, which I shall
call the ª reinscription thesisº . Here, these other domains of power might be treated as having been
reinscribed and in some sense made subordinate to the contemporary liberal framework of
governmentality. In such a view, heterogeneous powers such as sovereignty, discipline and of
biopower are all repositioned within the space of governmentality. The richness of empirical
possibility of an analytics of government thus leads to a downgrading of the importance of theoretical
questions of the relations between these power formations.
 K Comes 1st
Biopolitics comes first: the politicization of bare life is the decisive event of modernity.
Therefore, there is no net-benefit to the permutation because EITHER there is no
impact to the case because they can’t solve biopolitical problems with biopolitics OR
we solve the root cause of the aff.
Agamben 1998 [Giorgio, professor of philosophy at the University of Verona, Homo Sacer, pg. 4-5]
Foucault’s death kept him from showing how he would have developed the concept and study of
biopolitics. In any case, however,the entry of zoe into the sphere of the polis—the politicization of bare
life as such—constitutes the decisive event of modernity and signals a radical transformation of the
political-philosophical categories of classical thought. It is even likely that if politics today seems to be
passing through a lasting eclipse, this is because politics has failed to reckon with this foundational
event of modernity. The “enigmas” (Furet, LAllemagne nazi, p. 7) that our century has proposed to
historical reason and that remain with us (Nazism is only the most disquieting among them) will be
solved only on the terrain—biopolitics—on which they were formed. Only within a biopolitical horizon
will it be possible to decide whether the cate gories whose opposition founded modern politics
(right/left, private/public, absolutism/democracy, etc.)—and which have been steadily dissolving, to
the point of entering today into a real zone of indistinction—will have to be abandoned or will,
instead, eventually regain the meaning they lost in that very horizon. And only a reflection that, taking
up Foucault’s and Benjamin’s suggestion, thematically interrogates the link between bare life and
politics, a link that secretly governs the modern ideologies seemingly most distant from one another,
will be able to bring the political out of its concealment and, at the same time, return thought to its
practical calling.
A/T: Framework
 Policymaking – No Borders Key
Concrete policy solutions antithetical to the rejection of borders which requires
different material conditions and configurations of citizenship
Bauder, Professor, Dept. of Geography & Environmental Studies at Ryerson University, 2014 (Harald,
“The Possibilities of Open and No Borders,” Social Justice, Vol. 39, No. 4, N.D., JSTOR, Accessed 2/7/18
GDI-GN)

As pure negation, however, open-borders

and no-border perspectives do not offer any insights into
unconstrained human mobility as a material possibility; they do not convey in concrete terms how
mobility would be regulated, how people would become members of territorial communities, and
what kind of geographical vision and ontologies would frame an open-borders world. To address this
shortcoming, I draw on Bloch's (1959, 258-88) exploration of the "layers" of the category of the possible. One layer is the "fact-like object-based
possible" (sachhaft-objektgemafi Mogliche).' For the purpose of clarity and readability, I
will speak of the "contingently
possible." This concept refers to what is possible when certain conditions are met. This possibility
requires an "inner" capacity to enact the possibility as well as the "outer" conditions under which this
possibility can occur. Bloch used the example of a blooming flower that has the inner capacity to ripen into a fruit but only under the outer
condition of suitable weather. Another example, more consistent with the topic of this article , is a society that has the inner
capacity of providing equality, freedom Justice, and liberty under certain material outer conditions,
such as the territorial nation-state and particular configurations of citizenship. Unlike in biology, where the ripening of a
flower into a fruit is a necessary outcome once certain natural conditions are met, in the human world the actualization of the
possible is a creative activity that dialectically mediates between inner capacity and outer material
conditions. Bloch distinguishes the contingently possible from the "objectively real possible " (objektiv-real
Mogliche), which I will call the "real possible ,"2 This notion assumes the existence not only of
transformed material circumstances but also of different ways of thinking; it refers to potentialities
under not yet existing material conditions and the not-yet founded ontologies that will arise from these
conditions (Bloch 1959, 274-75). Unlike a seed that already contains the blueprint of an organism or the territorial nation-state that
embodies certain assumptions about political organization, the real possible projects an open future based on
conditions and practices that do not yet exist and are not yet knowable or even conceivable, given
contemporary concepts and ways of understanding the world.
 Policymaking – State-Centrism
There is no gamemaster because there is no consciousness or deliberate strategy
opposing specific adversaries. Knowing-how to-think-space is a pre-req to all strategic
reasoning
Hérodote Editorial, A journal of geography and geopolitics, 2007 (Chapter 2, Space,
Knowledge and Power: Foucault and Geography, eds. Stuart Elden, Professor of Political Theory and
Geography and Jeremy Crampton, Ph.D The Pennsylvania State University, 2007, pg.s 23-26, EBSCO,
Accessed 7/6/18 GDI-JV)

Having agreed to answer questions on geography, Michel Foucault has posed a set of questions to
geographers. Since the core of Michel Foucault’s questions essentially bears on the problem of power, of domination, the
responses could not be unanimous, nor could they seek to be collective. These interrogations of power, especially of the
ubiquitous vision that Foucault increasingly accords it, obviously does not only concern geography,
but social practices as a whole and representations that have been made of them. The replies from
geographers are therefore not specifically ‘geographical’, and they correspond to the idea that each
one of them has, not of geography, but of society as a whole. Problems of geography have thus to a certain extent
been eluded, both by Michel Foucault and by a good many of those who have endeavoured to respond to him. When Michel Foucault
asks: ‘Can you outline what you understand by power?’ and ‘Who has power?’, we think that there is no single
answer, but different types of response, depending on the scale of social space that one takes into consideration: the response differs according
to whether one takes planetary space (a very small scale) into consideration – in which case it concerns the role of the two
superpowers and very large transnational companies; or whether one envisages a very largescale
spatial organization of the family home and the relation of power between individuals. Understanding
the problem of power by systematically distinguishing between different spatial scales and different
levels of analysis enables us to avoid conflating very different, but nonetheless mutually articulating,
structures of power into a fluid whole and even a ubiquitous presence. When Michel Foucault asks:
‘What scope would you give to the notion of strategy?’, it is here that we are more critical in respect
to his whole discourse, because it tends to use the same term, strategy, to designate, on one hand,
plans that are deliberate, conscious, organized, devised to attain certain objectives or defeat an
adversary, by choosing means and ruses and considering the configuration of ‘terrain’; on the other,
dilute and unconscious tendencies, procedures in which the whole of society participates, without
realizing, and which produce involuntary effects, with neither winners nor losers. When, in his latest book, The
Will to Knowledge (which is a crucial piece of reflection for all of us), Michel Foucault shows in substance that what he
calls the ‘strategy of power’ proceeds not only via prohibitions regarding the essential problem of sexuality, but also – and much
more – through incitements to speak about ‘it’, to think about ‘it’, this ‘strategy’ that he reveals is precisely one that is unconscious and
involuntary, as much for those who exercise it (where are they? Everywhere) as for those who are
subjected to it (who are they? All of us). It comes down to involuntary apparatuses [dispositifs] and
unconscious collective propensities. It is essential to realize this, but [not] by saying: ‘It happens as if
there were a strategy and gamesmasters.’ It is precisely because there is not, because there is not a
conscious, deliberate strategy opposing specific adversaries for clearly perceived stakes that this
tendency is so strong at the heart of our society. When we speak of strategy and tactics, it is clearly
not about these unconscious apparatuses [dispositifs], these collective propensities that we are thinking, but about plans,
secretly or discretely constructed, devised by one of the protagonists in a relation of force, plans that take account not only of
the means and characteristics of the adversary, and of the other strategy that he, too, could put to
work, but also of the configuration of the ‘terrain’ (of topography on various scales of social space) and the relative
positions that the forces present occupy. It is for this that knowing-howto-think-space [le savoir-penser-
l’espace] has so great an importance in all strategic reasoning. The notion of strategy is applicable, in current vocabulary,
to a range of terms. Where it concerns us, we hold to the fact that every strategy implies a plan worked out in relation to
an enemy, be it real or imaginary, concrete or potential. The strategy with which we are occupied is
that which corresponds to a practice of the domination of space, in all its forms. Thinking about and
organizing space is one of the pre-occupations of power. If every strategy of power has a spatial
dimension, power also has a practice of spatial domination that is appropriate to its strategy. This
practice of spatial domination cannot be totally identified with military practice. The latter is only one aspect, one that is perhaps institutionally
concentrated, of the spatial practice of power. It is situated on the plane of ‘knowing-how-tothink-[the]-space [le savoir-penser-l’espace]’ of a
scarcely defined power. What characterizes power
is the way that its internal complexity goes hand in hand with a
multiform intervention on the plane of space. On the stage of confined territories, weak or fragmented authorities,
‘knowinghow-to-think-space’ boils down to knowing how to think war. Ruling substrata are reflected on a grand-scale, just as the chief of a
stronghold is essentially preoccupied with the topography of the reduced space that he is charged with defending, and not the strategic data
amidst which he is situated. When power is capable of reasoning on a smaller scale, its strategic knowledge diversifies. This is without doubt
true aboveall of State power, where war or the threat of war is no longer the only means of extending or
maintaining its hegemony over a given space. The rise of a range of forces, particularly in the sphere of economics, is based
on a comprehension of the play of spaces. Developed on a small scale (we should define more rigorously the level
of analysis privileged by different advisors), their strategy is often perceived only on a grand scale (or
more simply, on another scale), which obscures its significance. To decode the spatial practice of
different powers is to reveal their social strategy in terms of space, it is to clarify the underlying
mechanisms of the force of those who dominate, and the weakness of those who are dominated.
Strategy (as the knowledge/practice of space) can serve to subvert power itself. This
knowledge/practice cannot be neutral and, if it is to be used, it must be reinvented. The evidencing of
this ‘knowing-how-to-think-[the]-space’ of power must enable us to found, with the struggling
masses, a new and efficient spatial practice.

State-centered analyses of border violence reify biopolitics

Brabant, a member of the Hérodote editorial staff, 2007 (Jean-Michel, Chapter 3, Space,
Knowledge and Power: Foucault and Geography, eds. Stuart Elden, Professor of Political Theory and
Geography and Jeremy Crampton, Ph.D The Pennsylvania State University, 2007, pg.s 26-27, EBSCO,
Accessed 7/6/18 GDI-JV)

The notion of power must always be brought back to one’s approach to the social organization of
which it is the principal organizer. To avoid this reference or to skirt around this reality is to expose
oneself to mistakes in analysis and to bracket the same words under different notions . The power that
preoccupies us is that to which we are presently subjected in our society, not an abstract, atemporal power. Knowledge of this
power, its delimitation and the evaluation of its techniques of domination does not come down to an
exclusively spatial approach. This essentially hierarchical power is identified with the power of the
State, the guarantor and summit of this hierarchy. It is the armed branch of social organization, and this
connotation is one of the essential objectives of our study. To map power is first to map the power of the State in all its
levels [échelons], to define its different types of domination of space, to detect its areas of weakness and
contradictions. This should be the goal of the ‘knowledge of spaces’ for which we are fighting. This
hierarchical and concentrated power expands and reproduces itself in various agencies of society. This
hierarchization and concentration is the work of special interests who through their practice establish veritable networks of powers in which
particularly dangerous zones are partitioned. From this perspective, the process of production must be at the centre of our knowledge/practice
of space, because at the level of power, this knowledge and this practice are thought as a function of power. Rather than just enumerating
productions and resources – although it is not a question of under-estimating the importance of the data that power sometimes conceals – it
seems to us more pertinent to situate the strategic place of these elements in space, or in the combined play of different spaces of power. The
superimposition of maps of data and networks of power would certainly give us a few clues as to the space at stake in social conflicts. Should
our preoccupation limit itself, however, to the critical elucidation of present power in its mechanisms and the delimitations of its different
aspects? This criticism has the function of grasping and orientating the spatial resonances of the struggles of those whom power oppresses. In
the analysis of the
gestation of popular counter-powers that necessarily but not exclusively turn around
the power of the State, the definition of revolutionary power as a network of power taken up and
subjected to the control of different agents of the social process is at stake. The question of knowing
who has power, if we must perhaps initially try to reply to it as it is posed, is therefore foremost a
question of knowing who power serves.

The debate should be centered around who has the best orientation towards breaking
down the violent practices that result from borders any alternative framework is
complicit in the expulsion and dehumanization of millions of immigrants.
Fowler, Ph.D, Instructor at Washington State University, 2016 (Rebecca, “U.S. biopolitical Geographies
of the Migrant,” borderlands e-journal 15(1), GDI-JM)

In the desert, the state’s responsibility for migrant deaths is neatly evaded and rendered utterly
invisible. U.S. immigrant prevention through deterrence policies and border technologies of exterior
and interior enforcement constitute a deathly biopolitical project in the state’s creation of spatialized
geographies whose purpose is to contain, expel, and in the case of deathly desert environs, swallow
whole alien ‘Others’. U.S. biopolitical policies of citizenship, immigrant policing, and detention and
deportation inevitably rely on spatial logistics of containment to render invisible undocumented
persons while shoring up the global neoliberal capital project that relies on a tractable, disposable
labor force. The biopolitical making of space and place for the containment of brown illegalized
populations is established in four primary venues: first, in immigrant communities where people’s
experience of fear of deportation and of constricted space and restricted mobility become crucial
components in their subjugation; second, in ‘Papers-Please’ stylized geographies of arrest that lead to
detention and deportation; thirdly, in increasingly privatized detention centers built for the
warehousing of undocumented immigrants in the name of corporate profit; and finally, in deadly
hostile environs in desert treks that all too often become death marches when immigrants lose their
way and die from exposure to the elements. Anti-immigrant rhetoric and legislation and the
consequent creation of spatialized geographies for migrant containment work in tandem to benefit
corporate capital in the manufacturing of a convenient scapegoat to shoulder the burden of
responsibility for society’s ills and in the maintenance of an infinitely exploitable, infinitely disposable
migrant labor force.
 Policymaking – Biopolitics Before Politics
Democracy and totalitarianism are indistinct because exception marks the absolute
impossibility of decision (the cosmopolitanism of framework)—must attend to
biopolitics in order to found a genuinely political act.
Rancière 4 [Jacques, professor of philosophy at the University of Paris VIII, The South Atlantic
Quarterly, Vol. 103.2/3]

In such a way, the correlation of sovereign power and bare life takes place where political conflicts can
be located. The camp is the space of the "absolute impossibility of deciding between fact and law, rule
and application, exception and rule."10 In this space, the executioner and the victim, the German body
and the Jewish body, appear as two parts of the same "biopolitical" body. Any kind of claim to rights
or any struggle enacting rights is thus trapped from the very outset in the mere polarity of bare life
and state of exception. That polarity appears as a sort of ontological destiny: each of us would be in
the situation of the refugee in a camp. Any difference grows faint between democracy and
totalitarianism and any political practice proves to be already ensnared in the biopolitical trap.
Agamben's view of the camp as the "nomos of modernity" may seem very far from Arendt's view of
political action. Nevertheless, I would assume that the radical suspension of politics in the exception of
bare life is the ultimate consequence of Arendt's archipolitical position, of her attempt to preserve the
political from the contamination of private, social, apolitical life. This attempt depopulates the political
stage by sweeping aside its always-ambiguous actors. As a result, the political exception is ultimately
incorporated in state power, standing in front of bare life—an opposition that the next step forward
turns into a complementarity. The will to preserve the realm of pure politics ultimately makes it vanish
in the sheer relation of state power and individual life. Politics thus is equated with power, a power
that is increasingly taken as an overwhelming historico-ontological destiny from which only a God is
likely to save us. If we want to get out of this ontological trap, we have to reset the question of the
Rights of Man—more precisely, the question of their subject—which is the subject of politics as well.
This means setting the question of what politics is on a different footing. In order to do this, let us have
a closer look at the Arendtian argument about the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, an argument that
Agamben basically endorses. She makes them a quandary, which can be put as follows: either the rights
of the citizen are the rights of man—but the rights of man are the rights of the unpoliticized person;
they are the rights of those who have no rights, which amounts to nothing—or the rights of man are the
rights of the citizen, the rights attached to the fact of being a citizen of such or such constitutional state.
This means that they are the rights of those who have rights, which amounts to a tautology.11

Thought can produce an encounter with the Other which changes us completely—
critique lets us know that who we are is not staked in the calculative regime of
biopolitical management.
Zylinska, Referee for the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada,
2014 (Joanna, “The universal acts, Judith Butler and the biopolitics of immigration,” Cultural Studies
18.4, GDI JM)

The ethics of bodies that matter also entails the possibility of changing the laws and acts of the polis
and delineating some new forms of political identification and belonging. Indeed, in their respective
readings of Antigone, Butler and Derrida show us not only that the paternal law towards the foreigner
that regulates the idea of kinship in Western democracies can be altered but also that we can think
community and kinship otherwise. If traditional hospitality is based on what Derrida calls ‘a conjugal
model, paternal and phallocentric’, in which ‘[i]t’s the familial despot, the father, the spouse, and the
boss, the master of the house who lays down the laws of hospitality’ (2000, p. 149), openness towards
the alien and the foreign changes the very nature of the polis , with its Oedipal kinship structures and
gender laws. Since, as Butler shows us, due to new family affiliations developed by queer communities
but also as a result of developments in genomics it is no longer clear who my brother is, the logic of
national identity and kinship that protects state boundaries against the ‘influx’ of asylum seekers is to be
left wanting. This is not necessarily to advise a carnivalesque political strategy of abandoning all laws,
burning all passports and opening all borders (although such actions should at least be considered ),
but to point to the possibility of resignifying these laws through their (improper) reiteration. Enacted
by political subjects whose own embodiment remains in the state of tension with the normative
assumptions regarding propriety, gender and kinship that underlie these laws, the laws of hospitality
are never carried out according to the idea/l they are supposed to entail (cf. Butler 1993, p. 231). 5 3 4
CULTURAL STUDIES It is precisely Butler’s account of corporeality and matter, of political subjectivity and
kinship, which makes Levinas’ ethics (and Derrida’s reworking of it) particularly relevant to this project.
Although the concepts of the body and materiality are not absent from Levinas’ writings / indeed, he
was one of the first thinkers to identify embodiment as a philosophical blindspot / Butler allows us to
redraw the boundaries of the bodies that matter and question the mechanisms of their constitution.
Her ‘others’ are not limited to ‘the stranger’, ‘the orphan’ and the ‘widow’ of the Judeo-Christian
tradition, the more acceptable others who evoke sympathy and generate pity.10 It is also the AIDS
sufferer, the transsexual and the drag queen / people whose bodies and relationships violate traditional
gender and kinship structures / that matter to her. By investigating the contingent limits of
universalization, Butler mobilizes us against naturalizing exclusion from the democratic polis and thus
creates an opportunity for its radicalization (1997, p. 90). The ethics of bodies that matter does not
thus amount to waiting at the door for a needy and humble asylum seeker to knock, and extending a
helping hand to him or her. It also involves realizing that the s/he may intrude, invade and change my
life to the extent that it will never be the same again, and that I may even become a stranger in the
skin of my own home.
 Policymaking – Ethics Before Politics
Every act is ethical because our relationship to the world at large calls for our response
to our “place in the sun,” but the ethic of biopolitical management attempts to empty
this question of meaning through the instrumentalization of politics.
Zylinska, Referee for the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada,
2014 (Joanna, “The universal acts, Judith Butler and the biopolitics of immigration,” Cultural Studies
18.4, GDI JM)

Levinas writes, ‘To be a body is on the one hand to stand [se tenir ], to be master of oneself, and, on the
other hand, to stand on the earth, to be in the other , and thus to be encumbered by one’s body. But /
we repeat / this encumberment is not produced as a pure dependence; it forms the happiness of him
who enjoys it’ (1969, p. 164, original emphasis). One might perhaps conclude that the situation the self
finds itself in is indeed tragic, and that the need to bear the weight of corporeality that is not all mine
does not easily lead to ‘happiness’. However, Levinas does not propose a naïve celebration of
difference; he only suggests the openness to (or the enjoyment of) what befalls us may be, in the long
term, an easier and better response to our corporeal existence. It is precisely this openness and
enjoyment that my term ‘an ethics of bodies that matter’ refers to. The problem of openness which is
to be extended to our current and prospective guests / even, or perhaps especially , unwanted ones /
is, according to Derrida, coextensive with the ethical problem. ‘It is always about answering for a
dwelling place, for one’s identity, one’s space, one’s limits, for THE UNIVERSAL ACTS 5 3 3 the ethos as
abode, habitation, house, hearth, family, home’ (Derrida 2000, pp. 149/151, emphasis added). Of
course, this absolute and unlimited hospitality can be seen as crazy, self-harming or even impossible.
But ethics in fact spans two different realms: it is always suspended between this unconditional
hyperbolic order of the demand to answer for my place under the sun and open to the alterity of the
other that precedes me, and the conditional order of ethnos , of singular customs, norms, rules, places
and political acts. If we see ethics as situated between these two different poles, it becomes clearer
why we always remain in a relationship to ethics, why we must respond to it, or, in fact, why we will
be responding to it no matter what. Even if we respond ‘nonethically’ to our guest by imposing on him
a norm or political legislation as if it came from us ; even if we decide to close the door in the face of
the other, make him wait outside for an extended period of time, send him back, cut off his benefits or
place him in a detention centre, we must already respond to an ethical call. In this sense, our politics is
preceded by an ethical injunction, which does not of course mean that we will ‘respond ethically’ to it
(by offering him unlimited hospitality or welcome). However, and here lies the paradox, we will
respond ethically to it (in the sense that the injunction coming from the other will make us take a
stand, even if we choose to do nothing whatsoever and pretend that we may carry on as if nothing
has happened).

The ethical creation of self comes before their political prescriptions because it
determines our relationship to biopolitical decisions regarding which lives and
lifestyles are and are not allowed to subsist politically.
Gabardi 2001 [Wayne, Negotiating Postmodernism pp. 77-79]
Based on his research into ancient Greek ethics, Foucault identified four interrelated modes of ethical
practice that formed the basis of both a framework of ethical analysis and a model of freedom. They
were ethical substance, a mode of subjectivation, ethical work, and telos.5° Ethical substance refers to
that aspect or part of an individual’s behavior that is determined to be the main focus or “the prime
material of his (or her) moral conduct.” The mode of subjectivation is the form with which the different
parts or aspects of one’s self are arranged. It is the model that fashions or molds one’s self into a
distinctive style of existence. Foucault’s own mode of subjectivation fused aesthetics and politics into a
model of creative resistance, making one’s life into a work of art formed out of social and political
struggle. Ethical work involves the means, the methods, and the techniques by which we change
ourselves into an ethical subject. Telos involves committing oneself to a certain mode of being and
striving to consciously place one’s everyday actions within a pattern of conduct. Taken together, these
ethical practices inform a conception of self- hood in which a person takes an active role in shaping his
or her identity, rather than conforming to existing external standards and systems of
power/knowledge. The self is an assemblage of practices rather than an innate entity. While both
disciplined bodies and active ethical subjects are forged within the same power environments, the
active reflexive self appropriates practices of conduct from power/knowledge formations without
being dependent on their disciplinary codes. Foucault based this activity principally on an aesthetic
model because it was his conviction that art is the most potent medium of radical reflexivity and
resistance. Art is a potentially explosive transformative force. By linking it to the pursuit of an ethical life,
Foucault was able to stabilize and channel its energy into a relationship where “self-care” and
“responsibility for the other” inform and enhance the aesthetic drive. The interview “The Ethic of Care
for the Self as a Practice of Freedom” (1984) illuminates how in his final work Foucault was reweaving
ethics, aesthetics, and politics by making connections between power, resistance, self-care, liberty, and
caring for others. He states that freedom is the ontological condition and the basis of ethics.5’ He
defines ethics as a practice, a way of life, an “ethos,” rather than as a theory or a codified set of rules.52
He makes clear that self-care “implies complex relations with others” and that “this ethos of freedom is
also a way of caring for others.”” He states that power means “relationships of power:’ that resistance
and freedom are implicit in power relations, and that “domination” is different from power. It is a
situation in which “the relations of power are fixed in such a way that they are perpetually
asymmetrical and the margin of liberty is extremely limited?’54 Foucault further concludes that the
relationship between philosophy and politics is fundamental and that philosophy is charged with the
duty of “challenging all phenomena of domination at whatever level or under whatever form they
present themselves’55 This leads me to conclude that Foucault’s idea of freedom as ethical agency
involves choosing a life “style” and then integrating specific techniques of self-formation within an
environment of power formations. The power context of life stylization further requires the cultivation
of self-discipline and agonistic struggle to both resist disciplinary power matrices and carve out a space
for self-empowerment and creative choice. In other words, freedom entails a movement from
resistance to ethics to political action. Resistance, the most primal expression of freedom, involves the
revolt of the body against the normalizing effects of disciplinary biopower. This critical resistance,
largely reactive and defensive, is channeled into an affirmative ethical project concerned with self-
care. The rejection of an imposed identity and a set of norms becomes the impetus for fashioning
one’s own ethical code and conduct. The ethical agent becomes a political actor in joining struggles
that seek to alter power relations so that one can more freely live one’s life. The battle is joined at the
local and microlevels by countering norms with norms and techniques with techniques. I further
conclude that if, as I have argued, ours is a time of cultural postmodernization, of global-local flows of
postmodern goods services, and identities, of greater aesthetic-reflexive individuation, and of the
pervasive effects of information and mass media in our Lives, then quality of life and lifestyle issues
should take (and have taken) on a greater importance in our daily social interactions, economic
decisions, ethical considerations, and political concerns. Understood in this way, Foucault’s idea of
freedom as an aesthetic-ethical-political practice of lifestyle determination takes on greater
significance. It is both a product of our late modern/postmodern transition and a new mode of being
and normative guide in negotiating this condition.
 Fairness – Strategy-as-Power
Strategic tools have a monopoly over the decision to employ violence
Joxe, Professor of Political Theory and Geography and Crampton, Ph.D The
Pennsylvania State University, 2007
(Stuart, Jeremy, Space, Knowledge and Power: Foucault and Geography, 2007, Chapter 4, pg.s 29-30,
EBSCO, Accessed 7/7/18 GDI-JV)

Strategy: the art of making decisions conforming to the defence of an interest by taking into account a
system of opposed interests and the possibilities of the decisions and defence of these other interests .
(A definition ‘approximating’ that of game theory, rather than that of military strategy, where the notion of time is introduced straight away.) This

generalization of the notion of strategy is a semantic fact. One might deplore it, in that it ultimately
means anything that one wants it to mean, starting from the moment one considers man as thinking
and acting, resulting in: ‘amorous strategy’, the strategy of Saint-Etienne football team, ‘economic strategy’, government strategy,
business strategy, the strategy of the board, etc. Obviously, strategy does not mean war. Nor necessarily even conflict,

but always the power of decision, which is to say power. The strategy of a leader who seeks to remain
legitimate is not that of confrontation, or at least not only that. In any case – following the terminology of the games
of strategy – we generally distinguish between the aspects of cooperation and struggle , the carrot and the stick,
promise and threat, like the two faces of Janus, who marks a threshold and not a space. It is rather that strategy is the art of thinking the

threshold of the passage to the act [passage à l’acte?]. It is an art because strategy cannot give itself as an object
to be explained by the artist: it must be presupposed . One can think only the strategy of ‘x’ … and this ‘x’ escapes the object of the
strategic study in question, because one can only strategically draw the distinction between the interest and the

person who has the power to make decisions. (These terms are synonymous with game theory.) Every distinction drawn between
interest and person (for example, the Marxist analysis that distinguishes between the bourgeois class and the bourgeois parties) can only have strategic sense if one
is equally to establish that there exist contradictions between the bourgeois class and party, and that there are accordingly two interests present. There are
thus extreme limitations to the reflection on strategy, insofar as it is not applicable to a perfectly
disciplined organization whose interest is defined as a mission; one could say that it is the goal of armies to build up
strategic tools, which is to say means, defined as tightly as possible, that have a monopoly over the decision to employ
violence, and which tend to reduce the reality of social conflicts to matrices of calculus. We don’t believe that the notion of strategy, as we have defined it,
necessarily implies that through knowledge one makes war. The link with the concept of domination, on the other hand,

seems to us more evident, more grounded. In geography, the knowledge linked to the ‘scientific’
analysis of central places has been transformed into strategy and, very precisely, into a technique of
dominating and even occupying economic, political and geographic space . Is this knowledge theoretically grounded?
Apparently, geographers of the new school that has come from the works of Walter Christaller have hardly doubted this, even if each one of them today recognizes
that the hierarchical organization of urban groups is only one form amongst many others of modalities of relations between towns. Just as, in terms of intra-urban
structure, one recognizes that the centre of theocratic towns (exactly like the ‘city’ in current metropolises) are forms linked to the differentiation and hierarchy of
social orders totally different from those that, for example, enabled the birth of the agora in the Greek polis. If
the agora speaks of
homogeneity and equality in place of differentiation and hierarchy, it is because, for the historian of
towns, ‘scientific’ knowledge [savoir] is nothing other than the knowledge [connaissance] of that which
conforms to the logic of the development of a given society. How will this knowledge be used? The dominant class
can content itself to await the manifestations of a more or less spontaneous revolution, the biggest
challenge in the system. It can also, knowing of this revolution scientifically, seek actively to utilize it.
The application of the criteria of minimal energy to the division of a surface (where surfaces must be ‘efficiently’ divided between concurrent centres) in fact leads
to cutting space up into regular polygons, with hexagons enabling the best paving of a surface, minimizing the costs of movement and limitations. It is thus that the
Third Reich decided to organize ‘rationally’ the distribution of market towns along the planes of conquered Poland. We know that, since this aborted attempt,
explicitly founded on the works of Christaller, the examples of the use of this strategy of domination (military, agricultural, commercial, social) have multiplied.
Should this problematic not, for all that, be rejected entirely?
 Education – Roleplaying
Debate enacts and articulates the notion of “common substance” which lay at the
heart of the biopolitics of immigration: we tell ourselves stories regarding who we are
(policymakers) in reference to a mythical origin which must be protected from the
outside.
Ajana 2006 [Btihaj, “Immigration Interrupted,” Journal for Cultural Research, 10.3]

Moving onto the third aspect of the figuration of immanentism, we shall now discuss the ways in
which the mythical collectivised identity is brought into play in order to justify, articulate and sustain
the function of immanentism. The idea of collective identity is bound to the idea of ‘common
substance’ which, in the immanentist discourse, is always represented as the essential bond between
people and the foundational character of common identity. Common substance, as such, becomes the
logic of institutionalisation in immanentist politics which sees itself as the organiser and guarantor of
common identity. Yet the realisation of this communal identity takes place only at the level of
‘articulation’ (Nancy 1991) where the notion of ‘common substance’ is made ‘immanent’ to the idea of
communality so much so that, in immanentist political figurations, it is never questioned but always
taken-for-granted and perceived as ‘common sense’. And to question common sense/common
substance is to put at stake the very project of absolute separation and expose the inside to the
irreducible outside. Immanentist politics, as such, performs its task of absolute enclosure by means of
suppressing/reducing difference, regulating alterity and securing its ‘imaginative community’ (all being
manifested in immigration controls). And when the other is ‘needed’ (skilled migrants/ ‘Sector Based
Scheme’ migrants) or imposed (having to grant access to asylum seekers because of the signed
international conventions), there is a tendency to enforce modes of assimilation – what is called
‘integration’ – so that this Other is absorbed into a homogenous totality in which its ‘imagined’
disturbance/threat is reduced if not eliminated: ‘… hard work, determination and a willingness to
integrate propelled them [immigrants] forward… Britain has an enviable record of racial integration’
(Howard 2005). Integration, in this sense, becomes a work, an achievement to be extolled as the virtue
of ‘good citizens’ and ‘good governments’, all, while invoking principles of common substance and
essential unity; ‘That’s what makes us so proud to be British’ (Howard 2005). ‘To be British’ is, in fact, a
testimony of how the myth of communal essence speaks through the political enterprise of
immanentism and renders identity as a project, as the gathering together of absolute figures (citizens,
states, institutions, communities, etc.) in order to naturalise the mythical character of collective identity;
absolute ‘being-such’ (Agamben 1993, p. 2) or absolute ‘suchness’: He recounts to them their story, or
his own … he is his own hero, and they, by turns, are the heroes of the tale and the ones who have the
right to hear it and the duty to learn it. (Nancy 1991, pp. 43–4) I come from an immigrant family…For
centuries Britain has welcomed people from around the world…Many of them came to Britain with
almost nothing and had to start again from scratch. (Howard 2005) In myth, … existences are not offered
in their singularity: but the characteristics of particularity contribute to the system of the “exemplary
life”. (Nancy 1991, p. 78) The enunciation of absolute suchness is only possible insofar as it relies on
mythic, inaugural figurations that circumscribe commonality in such a way that the ‘invention’,
‘recital’ and ‘transmission’ (Nancy 1991, p. 44) of myth become the sole foundation of identity itself
and the means by which absolute separation is achieved. As such, one might compare political
conferences, assemblies, campaigns, etc. to a scene of gathering in which the myth is being recycled
and recited by telling stories about the genesis of absolute figures (citizens – including the assimilated
migrants, state, etc.), how they came to be together and how they must protect their ‘origins’ and
‘communal essence’ from the intrusion of the outsider (the ‘coming’ immigrant). In (political) speech,
the articulation of myth takes place when series of stories, shared values and beliefs are invoked in an
attempt to ennoble that speech (ibid., 48), substantiate immanentism and present collective identity as
an absolute figure whereby citizens and state are situated within an enclosure. In such a process, myth
transforms its mythic status into a natural one to the extent that it is no longer perceived as a myth but
becomes the condition par excellence for belonging, politics or any other form of ‘communitarian
fulfilment’ (ibid., 69).
 Education – Deliberation
Their argument that framework makes rational deliberation possible puts the cart
before the horse: biopolitical assumptions decide beforehand what counts as an issue
worthy of consideration and the rational process by which we consider said issue.
Doxdater 2008 [Eric, “The [Rhetorical] Question of Exception, For Now,” in Communication and
Critical/Cultural Studies 5.2]

The exception does not leave us ‘‘struck dumb’’ anymore than it spins the cosmopolitan music for
airports that inspires those who, mimicking Walter Benjamin’s figure of the pacifist, decry the ‘‘chipping
away of human rights,’’ proselytize public deliberation, and pin their hopes to an ineptly plagiarized
notion of reconciliation.15 Within the ban that sustains the exception, language is not colonized so
much as it is rendered a ‘‘force without significance.’’16 Discourse is prohibited, particularly as it
expresses the fragile relationship between speech and human life; the contingency that affords
opportunity for (rhetorical) questions is sanctioned as dangerous and incorporated into a ‘‘necessary’’
zone of indifference; the performative and oppositional space of invention is disciplined by timeless
commonplaces, including the idea that recognition’s struggle begins and ends with the law’s stamp of
good identitarian housekeeping; extra-legal without being illegal, the ban’s grammar strives less to
suspend contestation than detach its practice from concerns over the validity of interpretation and the
quality of judgment. In the midst of the exception, these are the atrocities inflicted on ‘‘everyday
speech.’’17
A/T: Link Turns
 A/T: We Aren’t Just Physical Borders
Only thinking of borders in terms of social control accounts for the diffusion of the
biopolitical management of mobility all governmentality.
Lalonde, Professor in the Department of Sociology and Legal Studies 2017 [Patrick,
“Cyborg Work: Borders as Simulation,” The British Journal of Criminology azx070,
https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azx070] GDI-CL

Walters (2006b) cites Balibar’s (2002) notion of the ‘ubiquity of borders’ in suggesting that rather than
disappearing, borders are actually proliferating and becoming “‘a grid ranging over the new social
space’ rather than a line separating it from outside” (Balibar 2002: 84–85 as cited in Walters 2006b:
199). Walters (2006a) develops the firewall metaphor as a possible alternative that avoids fixation
with notions of geography. Firewalls basically function to identify ‘risky’ (or black-listed) data and
subsequently, ‘Malicious packages are blocked, returned or perhaps “quarantined”’ (Walters 2006a:
152). Simultaneously, firewalls allow ‘green-listed’ data to move about the network. The firewall also
has the ability to examine ‘grey-listed’ (or unknown) data and compare it against black-listed data for
similarities, making decisions about whether to allow or deny the data based on risk. Thus the firewall
metaphor allows moving beyond notions of borders as ‘walls’ to instead employing a filter logic in which
borders ultimately aspire not to simply arrest movement, but rather ‘to produce and distribute both
mobility and immobility’ (Walters 2006a: 152).Unfortunately, this metaphor only partially explains
contemporary borders. Remote control implies that risky subjects and commodities are often
intercepted by visa offices, airlines, commercial carriers and so forth before they reach physical
borders. Firewalls do not function via remote control to block packets before they leave their ‘source
location’. Rather, firewalls block packets of data at the back end—the gateway of the network—much
like physical borders. Additionally, the firewall is completely ‘responsible’ for blocking risky data, and
third parties such as Internet service providers (ISPs), businesses or individuals are largely uninvolved in
protecting other third-party networks. Furthermore, while borders use databases to analyse risk
associated with mostly known individuals (developed further below), firewalls must analyse disguised
data packets against security cases the firewall (or other firewalls) have documented in the past. In
short, unlike borders, firewalls are largely ‘flying blind’, without third-party assistance, as they combat
risks at the gateway of the network exclusively. In trying to avoid issues of geography, Walters
(2006a) ultimately ends up describing traditional sovereign borders exclusively.Muller (2011: 104)
argues that as governance efforts shift from governing migration towards instead governing mobility
under neoliberal risk-management strategies, borders should be imagined more as filters rather than
as limits. As voluntary risk-management programs such as NEXUS in North America become more
prevalent, the border begins to act as a filter, separating mobilities based on membership rights in
what Muller (2010b: 80) calls ‘multi-speed citizenship’. The border identifies ‘safe citizenship’ and
serves to sort or filter according to an individual’s digitized citizenship or ‘netizenship’ (Muller 2010b:
83).While the filter metaphor arguably avoids binary oppositions and geographical arguments while
also adequately representing how trusted trader and traveller programmes function, this metaphor
also only partially explores how borders function to govern mobility. Filters are generally designed as
membranes used to govern the flow of substances. They act to separate unwanted particles that are
dissimilar to the desired substance. Other particles are confined within the membrane while the desired
substance is permitted to flow through to its final destination. Filters work to separate different physical
properties from each other. They do so by being able to interrupt dissimilar particles. Unlike borders,
which tend to allow the movement of certain levels of risk, filters are low tech in that they are generally
not ‘programmed’ to discern between different levels of potentially ‘risky’ particles—they simply act to
block all potentially risky particles (regardless of their actual risk). When water is filtered, a particle of
dirt that poses little threat to human health will be blocked just as often as a deadly toxin like lead. Also,
similar to the firewall metaphor, filters only work where installed and tend to protect a certain reservoir
or space (inside) from exterior particles (outside), which ignores the use of modern technologies of
remote control to arrest flows before they can reach filters. Any revised metaphor for borders must be
able to employ everything, i.e. currently agreed upon in the literature regarding borders and security.
This includes the following: (1) the work of bordering and related border technologies unfolds at an
increasing variety of official state sites in addition to unofficial public and private non-state sites (both
within individual nation states and around the world); (2) traditional physical, sovereign and
geographic borders persist and continue to perform various governance functions (regardless of the
aforementioned developments); (3) borders and mobility are governed by and through the calculation
and analysis of risk vis-à-vis information contained in databases; (4) borders operate by
responsibilizing third parties (individuals, airlines, commercial carriers, and so forth) in collecting and
reporting data on behalf of the state; (5) vis-à-vis the use of databases and information in governing
risk, borders are inherently part of security continua, working alongside other policing and intelligence
agencies, enforcement locales, private actors, and so forth in producing ‘security’ (however currently
conceived); and (6) borders continue to provide the function of securitizing and governing various
mobilities and flows (of people, financial instruments, commercial goods and so forth). In addition, this
revised metaphor must also consider borders within the context of governance. The literature has
undoubtedly established borders as technologies of governance (see e.g. O’Connor and de Lint 2009;
Pratt 2010; Aas 2011; Rygiel 2012) including as tools in biopolitical governance (Rygiel 2010; Vaughan-
Williams 2010). Governmentality analyses consider just what rationalities—styles of thinking and ways
of rendering reality thinkable—and technologies—assemblages of persons, techniques, and institutions
—are employed for the purposes of governing conduct (Rose and Miller 2008: 16). In terms of
biopolitics—or the governance of life itself—borders function not by simply isolating and enclosing
individuals to execute disciplinary power over them, but rather function to permit circulation, flow
and movement while identifying and cancelling out dangerous circulations (Vaughan-Williams 2010:
1078). As such, biopolitical borders are seen as conforming to characteristics of Deleuze’s (1992)
control society, in which governance is no longer confined to institutions (as was characteristic of
disciplinary societies) but rather is increasingly ‘more supple, dispersed, and nebulous’ (Walters 2002:
574).
 A/T: We Change Enforcement
Reforming enforcement validates the narrative of law, only questioning this
lawfulness and its role in historical violence can address the punitive dimension of
immigration
Valdez, Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the Ohio State University,
2016(Inés, “Punishment, Race, and the Organization of U.S. Immigration Exclusion,” Political Research
Quarterly, Vol. 69, No. 4, December 2016, JSTOR, Accessed 7/2/18 GDI-GN)

Walter Benjamin notes in Critique of Violence that violence and disproportionality of punishment
reveal “something rotten:” law reaffirms itself and its origins “jut manifestly and fearsomely into
existence” (1986, 286). While Benjamin refers to capital punishment, his reflections apply to the question of
disproportionate punishment generally, a salient complaint in the immigration debate and scholarly
literature, which argues that deportation is excessive punishment for the civil violation of immigration
laws, or even the minor crimes that trigger deportation (Kanstroom 2007, 243). The goal of activists is to restore
proportionality: ease or eliminate the punishment for immigration violations. However, a view of punishment as violent
reassertion of law suggests we should put into question the narratives of lawfulness that underlie the
immigration regime, the history sanctioned by these laws, and the history erased. Ultimately, the violence
stems from the need to prevent the contestation of the narrative of law by the publicity of the constitutive
violence of slavery, conquest, annexation, and aggressive war. Thus punishment is polyvalent and its
violence is not connected to the severity of the violations to which it avowedly responds. Punitive conditions
legislated for migrants are alternatively and/or jointly used as regenerative, disciplinary, moralizing, and
criminalizing. Because the threatening racialized subject that justifies enforcement is given meaning by
these actions, punitiveness both targets and shapes race. The acts of punishment that accompany migrants in their daily
lives and—for those eligible—their paths to legal status, can be seen as obstacles that racialized subjects overcome to prove 11 they benefit the
social body, or as interventions that discipline those permanently excluded. Thus
punishment is a technique utilized by
different forms of power: sovereign, disciplinary, or biopolitical.
 A/T: We’re Humanitarian
Humanitarian borderwork perpetuates the reconfiguration of the border as a
biopolitical space by introducing new categories of life and consolidating socio-
political hierarchies
Jones et al., professor in the Department of Geography at UH Mānoa, 2017 (Reece,
Corey Johnson, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Gabriel Popescu, Indiana University South
Bend, Alison Mountz, Balsillie School of International Affairs, Wilfrid Laurier University, “Interventions on
the state of sovereignty at the border,” Political Geography July 2017, Research Gate, Accessed 7/10/18,
GDI-JV)
In late April 2015, the Nobel Prize-winning medical humanitarian organization Medecins Sans Fronti eres/Doctors Without Borders (MSF)
announced that they would begin Search and Rescue (SAR) operations in the Mediterranean (del Valle, 2016). They joined a
large cast of state actors, border police, coastguards, militaries and other non-state actors engaging in
SAR missions aimed at saving the lives of people on the move as they encounter the violence of
exclusive sovereign borders (Basaran, 2015). Over the following months MSF found itself active at a range of sites providing,
amongst other things, mobile clinics, bus services and transit spaces in Greece and the Western Balkans. Search and rescue at sea
and the provision of basic needs in transit spaces are designed to provide care and uphold human
dignity, and have emerged over previous decades to ‘reinvent the border as a space of humanitarian
government’ (Walters, 2011, p. 138). As borders have multiplied and states have developed and deepened a
range of practices designed to regulate mobility, borders have come to be recognized as spaces of
suffering and death (Weber & Pickering, 2011). Here what I term humanitarian borderwork (Rumford, 2008) is
oriented around alleviating the worst excesses of the violence of sovereign borders (Hindess, 2006) while
also attempting to govern mobility (Pallister-Wilkins, 2015). This humanitarian borderwork continues the
reconfiguration of the border as a biopolitical space of rescue and the provision of basic needs (Scott-
Smith, 2016) while consolidating borders as selectively permeable spaces of inclusion and exclusion. As
such, humanitarian rationalities adjust what political geographers, border studies and critical security
studies' scholars have come to understand as borderwork in two key ways. One is by re-orienting
border practices around the provisions for particular forms of life, and the other is by introducing
humanitarian actors into the borderwork assemblage. As humanitarian borderwork introduces new
actors, it also works to produce new types of border spaces constituted around practices of rescue
and the provision of basic needs while introducing new categories of life and consolidating socio-
political hierarchies. MSF is only one actor and Europe only one site in this emerging assemblage. Similar humanitarian logics
intersect with the policing of movement along the US-Mexico border (J. Williams, 2015) and increasingly
come to structure and legitimize externalized border practices , from Australian prevention of irregular boat arrivals
(Little & Vaughan-Williams, 2016) to efforts to govern people on the move along the routes of travel by instituting ‘laissez-passer’ transport
corridors. The
practices that fall under the rubric of humanitarian borderwork marry rationalities of care
with those of control and speak to longer-running security practices, as sovereign power has sought to
reconcile the needs of mobile populations with territorial sovereignty. These practices include
configuring and legitimising externalized border controls as in the Australian case, traditional border control
that polices life alongside and within policing mobility and humanitarian actors and political activists
purposefully engaging in life-saving as an act of resistance to exclusive sovereignties. Humanitarian
borderwork is part of a different spatial configuration of security focused on the well-being of people
on the move, while at the same time intersecting with and sometimes consolidating particular forms
of territorial control enacted at the border. As a response to vulnerability at the border, humanitarian borderwork
governs this tense relationship to the benefit of state actors concerned with governing mobility,
humanitarian actors concerned with governing life, and those people on the move made acutely
vulnerable in border spaces and by border regimes. The humanitarian rationalities expressed by some
borderworkers, such as EU member-state border police and Frontex (Aas & Gundhus, 2015) are sometimes presented as a
tool of legitimation grounded in the powerful subject position carved out by claiming to speak and act
for humanity (Feldman & Ticktin, 2010). However, it is important to stress that humanitarian borderwork as a
performative response is intimately related to the particular structural politics of the border that
prescribe processes of inclusion and exclusion. ‘Border-crossing as a matter of life and death’ (Walters,
2011, p. 138) is mitigated through practices of humanitarianism based on universal ideas of humanity that
appear to stand in sharp contrast to the exclusive nature of sovereign states and citizenshi p (Balibar, 2009).
Such a worldview is encompassed in the name Medecins Sans Frontieres/Doctors Without Borders even while humanitari- anism in
practice works through particular forms of triage that sculpt new categories of life and produce
particular subject positions between those in need and those with the power to assist . Humanitarian
action, with its claims to de-territorialize universalism and challenge sovereign power over life and
death, actually reterritorializes and consolidates sovereignty in practice. SAR operations expand the
zones of possible intervention into international waters and are reliant on the permission and
guidance of sovereign authorities, while on land the creation of transit spaces along transport routes are in continuous
negotiation with local political actors and national authorities. The focus on borderwork in this intervention stresses the
productive nature of the humanitarian action being undertaken in border spaces, while the focus on
work also suggests the involvement of active agents in this production. It is to these agents and this production
that I now turn, with a focus on the new actors, new spaces and new categories produced through humanitarian borderwork. There has
been a growth in work recognising the presence of humanitarian sensibilities in border policing (Aas &
Gundhus, 2015; Pallister-Wilkins, 2015; J.; Williams, 2015). Rather than running counter to, or directly contradicting, practices of control
concerned with regulating mobility in border spaces, humanitarian
concerns for life come to structure and offer
opportunities for border actors to intervene as they seek not only to govern mobility but also to
govern life. Refugee camps have been the traditional setting where humanitarian actors have enacted
their commitment to the provision of the necessary conditions for life. Camp logics instrumentally
contain and control mobility so that care can be administered . In humanitarian borderwork, mobility has a different
constitutive role, as people on the move challenge traditional humanitarian governance's camp-based territorialized care (Scott-Smith, 2016).
We see care being re-oriented around mobility and humanitarian actors join more traditional border actors such as border police in practices of
SAR (del Valle, 2016). In the Mediterranean, SAR is perhaps the most prominent form of humanitarian borderwork and has come to determine
a large number of the operational duties of the border police and coastguard who are joined by new private philanthropic organizations such as
the Migrant Offshore Aid Station, medical humanitarian organizations such as MSF, and more activist-focused groups such as Seawatch. In the
southern Mediterranean, border police and humanitarians work as part of a border assemblage under sovereign co-ordination, for example the
Italian Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre in Rome. In these SAR operations that have ‘saved’ 100,000s in the last three years, rescue
appears to be the primary motivation, but in practice they are also border-policing operations with sovereign logics .
Here the humanitarian imperative to rescue and the Safety of Life at Sea directive expands the space of operations and intervention into
international waters, meaning that boats can now be intercepted in international waters whereas before purely borderpolicing operations
could only take place in territorial waters. Humanitarian borderwork is also practiced along the routes of people on the move and becomes
territorialized in transport hubs and in border spaces where mobility is interrupted. These are often temporary, transit spaces reflecting the
temporality of care provision itself as an ‘emergency’, stopgap measure, and they are constituted through an intimate relationship with
mobility. Across the European borderscape these transit spaces appear at ports, along major transport arteries, at railway stations and at
border crossing points, and are produced by an assemblage of people on the move, humanitarian actors, border police, and borders
themselves. Withinthese spaces a range of practices concerned with care giving occur based on particular
categories of life. These categories iterate existing categories of mobility such as refugee or migrant
while producing new categories based on vulnerability and need. At times these new categories of life
built around vulnerability and need challenge the traditional binary between refugees and migrants
that underpins the refugee regime. This regime, based as it is on particular liberal understandings of
risk separating the political from the socio-economic and consolidating territorial sovereignty through
its relationship with border crossing, is seen by some humanitarian actors as limiting. In such instances
humanitarian organizations like MSF stress that they treat people based on need, not their legal status. In fact, I first encountered the term
‘people on the move’ being used by MSF as a way of moving beyond the refugee/migrant binary. That said, certain
categories of life
reflect vulnerability for particular categories of people such as those denied safe and legal routes
through a variety of legal and bureaucratic measures governing mobility. These categories of life also
cement existing social hierarchies between those with the power to act and those reliant on
assistance while generating differentiations within and between people on the move themselves.
Here vulnerability and need are often influenced by pre-existing attitudes towards ‘who’ is
understood as a humanitarian ‘victim’. Hierarchies and differentiations develop or are reproduced between genders, between
children and adults, and between people according to national origin. Therefore, humanitarian borderwork produces
categories of life around those considered in need of assistance such as women and children in conjunction with new
border spaces and practices designed to administer to and relieve such suffering. Humanitarian borderwork is very diverse in terms of actors
and border spaces because of its contingent relationship with mobility. Fluctuating
assemblages of actors with divergent
socio-political objectives undertake humanitarian borderwork. These actors share humanitarian
sensibilities but perform acts of rescue and caregiving for reasons that cannot be considered ‘wholly’
humanitarian, as can be seen in border-policing missions that mobilize humanitarian SAR logics in contrast to SAR undertaken by
humanitarian agencies. Humanitarian borderwork is therefore indicative of the instrumental and normative
logics present in much humanitarian work, where pragmatic security concerns intersect with affective
concerns for people's wellbeing and dignity.
 A/T: We’re Not Coercive
Biopolitics in the control society is less coercive than disciplinary power, but its
methods of self-discipline are more insidious and instrumentalize our freedoms as the
level of desire
Ajana 2005 [Btihaj, “Surveillance and Biopolitics,” Electronic Journal of Sociology]
To begin with, and as proposed by Michel Foucault (2003 [1976]), the concept of biopolitics entails the
notion of biopower which, unlike the theory of sovereign right (‘to take life or let live’), is not
concerned with the practice of power over the individual/social body but acts at the level of
massification instead of individualisation (2003 [1976]: 243). It preoccupies itself with the notion of
population in its multiplicity and on the global scale and thereby overrides the old right of sovereignty
with that of ‘to make live and to let die’. What characterises biopower is not so much discipline
directed at ‘man-as-body’, as was the case in disciplinary society, but the will to control and regulate
‘man-as-species’ in a preventive way so much so that biological life becomes the main problem and the
salient concern of politics. Biopolitics is the process by which biopower is exerted and life is managed
with the aim to achieve ‘equilibration’, ‘regularity’ (Foucault, 2003 [1976]: 246) and ‘normality’
through mechanisms of control and modes of intervention which are ‘immanent’ (Hardt and Negri,
2000: 230, and Nancy, 1991: 3) to all areas of life and encompass a myriad of subtle practices
operating at the level of relations between human beings. This (historical/political) passage from
disciplinary society to control society as Deleuze (in Hardt, 1998: 23, Rose, 1999: 233, and Hardt and
Negri, 2000: 22-3) has it is what marks the fundamental shift from centralised power of institutions
(such as prisons, schools, hospitals, family, etc) toward rhizomatic networks of control which proceed far
beyond explicit disciplinary deployment of power to much more dynamic and implicit forms inscribed
into the practices of everyday life. They are necessarily less authoritarian than the former mode of
coercive power (Hardt, 1998: 27). From Foucault and passing through Deleuze, it can be understood
how what is in question is the dispersion and omnipresence of biopower within the various
transactions, relations and flows which render individuals as ‘dividuals’ (Deleuze in Rose, 1999: 234)
characterised by their capacities and identified by their pins, profiles, credit scoring, etc, rather than
their subjectivities. This withering away of subjectivity is what makes biopower more effective and less
obtrusive (Rose, 1999: 236). Without subjectivity, the possibility of resistance fades into the immanent
arrangements and administrative operations of biopolitics. It is in similar light that Foucault (2003
[1976]: 246) asserts that biopolitics does not intervene in a therapeutic way nor does it seek to
individualise and modify a given person. This would entail the production of subjectivity itself. Instead it
functions at the level of generality with the aim to identify risk groups, risk factors and risk levels, and
therefore anticipate, prevent, contain and manage potential risk, all through ‘actuarial analysis’ and
‘cybernetics of control’ (Rose, 1999: 235, 237) rather than diagnostic scrutiny of the pathological
individual. In such a model of power the state is no longer the sole agent of control but
individuals/communities themselves participate in their own self-monitoring, self-scrutiny and, self-
discipline through mundane and taken-for-granted regulatory mechanisms such as alcohol level
testing, community care, technologies of contraception, vaccinations, food dieting, training and other
forms of ‘technologies of the self’ (Foucault, 1988). These technologies of the self ‘operate through
instrumentalizing a different kind of freedom’ (Rose, 1999: 237); different not in a quantitative sense
but insofar as it comes part and parcel of a process of responsiblisation through which individuals are
made in charge of their own behaviour, competence, improvement, security, and ‘well-being’.
 Culture Swamps Policy
Probable cause and other “restrictions” at the border provide a façade to the violent
separation of criminalized risk groups from the populace
Salter, Professor at the School of Political Studies, University of Ottawa, 2006 (Mark B., “The Global
Visa Regime and the Political Technologies of the International Self: Borders, Bodies, Biopolitics,”
Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 31, Google Scholar, Accessed 7/9/18 GDI-GN

This lighter “reasonable suspicion” standard is applied to other travelers at the airport . In US v. Sokolaw,
the court argued that adherence to a law enforcement profile, which does not meet the standard of
probable cause, may meet the standard of reasonable suspicion. The case revolved around a drug
smuggler detained due to a number of suspicious activities that met a particular profile . The court
upheld that meeting an established profile would lead to reasonable suspicion and thus grant law enforcement
the authority Mark B. Salter 181 to stop the traveler.68 Consequently the test of reasonable suspicion, tied with the exceptional state of the
border, leads to the rule by decision. However the moment of decision must be disaggregated. What are these
profiles? How are they managed? How are decisions made? Since Agamben neglects this moment of
decision, focusing as he does on the capacity for decision, we must turn to anthropologists or
sociologists of the border. This leads to consideration of the agents of discretion. Timothy Mitchell, Heyman, and
Mountz have discussed the ways that governmental bureaucracies enact specific roles within an
administrative structure, so that we may not infer practice from policy documents alone .69 Gilboy charts
how immigration inspectors informally share experiences that lead to the supplementing of official
risk profiles with national stereotypes.70 Heyman describes the “thought-work” of immigration
officers, consisting of developing conceptual schema through which to apply abstract rules to specific
cases.71 In his evaluation of the thought-work of officers on the US/Mexico border, Heyman develops a broad model, with
some specific implications for the policing of populations. In addition to a legal superstructure, he
points to “covert classifications” used by officers to structure their discretionary decisions.72 The
covert classification is made according to perceived “moral worth,” “national origins stereotypes” similar to those
elaborated by Gilboy, and “apparent social class.”73 These ethnographies of the bureaucracy suggest there is a slippage between risk profiles
and stereotypes. Didier Bigo suggests that within the European context the
emergence of a cohort of migration managers
has shifted policing “from the control of and hunt for individual criminals . . . to the surveillance of so-
called risk groups, defined by using criminology and statistics .”74 The reliance on technology to cope
with the rapidly increasing number and variety of risk profiles should be viewed with skepticism:
“Notwithstanding the increasing appeal to sophisticated computer-based models within
geodemographics, the systems persist in relying on stereotypical images, and on small-scale narratives
of dispositions and their intended consequences.” 75 The credibility of the entrant’s story becomes crucial to the decision
to admit or reject, a decision that is always made on the basis of insufficient evidence and mistrust of the speaker, and complicated by an
incomplete documentary trail. It is clear that the right to be presumed innocent or to have a fair trial must be held in abeyance at the border
under the twin rubrics of efficiency and security.
 A/T: NGOs Check
NGOs are coopted by neoliberalism
Lewis Dowle, 11-27-2017, "Spaces of Exception and Refusal? The Borderzone of Mexico/US," E-International Relations, http://www.e-
ir.info/2017/11/27/spaces-of-exception-and-refusal-the-borderzone-of-mexico-us/

Through the lens of humanitarianism in the Mexico/US borderland, the best and worst of society are at
play in a clash of titans. Despite migration being perceived as a threat to the US Homeland Security, it is
rather the migrants themselves who are likely in danger fleeing from conflict or poverty (Ibrahim,
2005). The US discourse towards migrants has evolved from simply determining who may be crossing
the border illegally, to now creating a culture of suspicion with every undocumented migrant being
perceived as a terrorist threat (Williams, 2015). The migrant therefore becomes guilty until proven
otherwise. Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) including Tucson Samaritans and No More Deaths
(NMD) were established in the 2002 and 2004 respectively to identify migration paths and aid in the
provision of food, drink, blankets and healthcare (Johnson, 2015; Williams, 2015). These NGOs have
come under scrutiny and even arrest as volunteers rushed three migrants to the hospital to receive
medical attention (Williams, 2015). This occurrence was concomitant with the rise in the US Border
Patrol assuming the role of humanitarianism, taking the responsibility onto themselves with NGOs
becoming “criminalized and regulated to a greater and greater degree” (Williams, 2015: 11). This
seemingly Janus-faced allure of US border patrol serves only to further enforce territorial sovereignty
(Williams, 2015). Since then, those in need of medical help are taken to hospital by these petty
sovereigns, only to be handcuffed as they receive treatment before being deported (Williams, 2015).
Where there are spaces of exception, resistance always follows (Doty, 2011). Foucault’s analysis of
power was rooted in the notion of where power prevails, resistance ensues (Doty, 2011). The
‘Prevention through Deterrence’ policy, a state of perennial exception as the Camp, offers the
opportunity for resistance (Doty, 2011). Those the state deems to be bare life contain the power to
resist authority and oppression; though infrequent, Doty explains how each survivor performs
resistance against the US state. Doty continues in regards to ‘intrinsic resistance’, how biopower is
enacted through the Border Patrol’s Search and Rescue division which rescues undocumented migrants
from a death which they have led them to. In many respects, the US state controls the individuals in
their lives and deaths, resonating with Foucault’s ‘to make live and let die’. The ‘Land of the Free’ ergo
becomes the antithesis to freedom, creating in the borderzone the nullification of rights for
undocumented migrants (Johnson, 2015; Sparke, 2006). With such humanitarianism being averted by
the political eye, Agamben attests to the division of the rights of the man/woman from those of a citizen
(Agamben, 1998). The very persecution many migrants flee becomes a sobering reality within the
Mexico/US borderzone (Sparke, 2006). State actions serve as ‘minimalist biopolitics’ in conserving life,
rather preventing death, only to more efficiently remove the individual (Williams, 2015). Furthermore,
the NGOs that remain are not only less empowered, but increasingly under the influence of
neoliberalism, becoming “like full-blooded capitalists” (Dolhinow, 2005: 574). With the inextricable
link between humanitarianism and capitalism, NGOs can never be seen as apolitical (though this is
contested), with each carrying a politics and polity they serve (Dolhinow, 2005). This relation to
capitalism will now be expounded upon. The Mexico/US borderzone is both a space of exception and
refusal, rooted in a history of racial discourse and capitalist supremacy. Securitisation began in the
1970s, culminating with the nigh-impenetrable combination of Smart Borders and ‘Prevention through
Deterrence’ in the modern-day. Illustrative of sovereignty and biopolitics, this space of exception has
been legitimised through the powerful discourse of the War on Terror. Sovereignty is asserted onto the
populations, and the exception becomes the rule within the borderzone, thereby becoming Agamben’s
Camp. The Ban-opticon and its propinquity with bare life are witnessed in the ‘Prevention through
Deterrence’ policy exercised across the space of refusal within the borderzone. A perennial emergency
perceived in the borderzone demands the support of petty sovereigns and smart borders to enable
securitisation to perform. Power breeds resistance and this is evident in the survivors of those crossing
the militarised borderzone, but is also apparent with the role of NGOs in humanitarianism. NGOs
become inseparable from the neoliberal politics they are rooted in, and capitalism seeps into the
everyday practices at the border. A Marxist Geopolitics and its analysis pertaining to social
infrastructure, the rule of elite classes and the valorisation of territory provides an ample lens through
which to discern a complex borderzone. Nevertheless, the materiality of the borderzone and its
realisation in infrastructure and policy matters less than perhaps the geographical imagination the
everyday migrant shares when such thoughts are conceived (Purcell & Nevins, 2005). It is here in the
mind that the seed of fear takes root, and “fear is the ultimate renewable resource” just waiting to be
capitalised upon further (Klein, 2007: 9).
 A/T: Necropolitics
Necropolitical criticisms of the border fail – analyzing biopolitics uniquely key
Gilberto Rosas, Associate Professor of Political Science, Washington University in St Louis, 2007,
“Fragile Ends of War,” Social Text 25 (2 (91)): 81-102. GDI John Melton

In contrast, Achille Mbembe’s suggestion that colonial and neocolonial venues anticipate, develop, and
perfect violent biopolitical technologies proves useful in analyzing the legacy of U.S. empire in the
borderlands. Yet a necropolitical analysis of militarized policing in the borderlands perhaps loses sight
of the biopolitically organized vitality of living and ultimately laboring immigrants. As the young
people’s repeated though painful forms of border crossing show, the vast majority of undocu- mented
border crossers succeed in making the crossing. Biopolitical tech- nologies over life and death, as
diffused forms of capitalist state power, are social relation integral to the politics of labor subordination.
Many die, but many, many, more struggle to live and work. of illegality. Over the longue durée, the
ends of war on the border appear to mar- shal the technologies over life and death to inaugurate bodies
flowing across borders to the social relation of illegality. In this respect, Nicholas De Genova has
presciently suggested that the conjunction of dramatic apprehensions and militarized policing along
the borderlands produces an “exemplary theater for staging the spectacle of the ‘illegal alien’ that the
law produces.”35
Aff
Link Responses
 Inclusion Turn
Biopolitics is first and foremost about excluding migrants for the health of the national
populace; plan reverses this.
Apatinga, Department of Sociology at Memorial University, 2017 (Gervin, “Biopower and
Immigration: A Biopolitical Perspective on Anti-Migration Policies,” Research on Humanities and Social
Sciences 7(20) GDI-CL)

Although states engage in multilateral and bilateral relations as well as ratifying common conventions
and countries. For instance, all over the world, particularly among western countries, there have been
a growing number of technologies of power adopted by governments to govern immigrant
populations including undocumented migrants, asylum seekers and refugees (Nyers, 2003). These
technologies of power take the form of deportations, detention centers, and limited access to job
opportunities, health care, housing and education (Tyler, 2006) to eliminate immigrants. Likewise,
humanitarian actions although apolitical virtually reduce human life to bare life, a life that can easily
be killed in foreign territories. This bare life is more associated with vulnerable immigrants living on
international frontiers than any group of people (see Ticktin, 2006; Agamben, 1998). Similarly, there
have been increasing xenophobic attacks on immigrants as well as incessant calls for governments to
tighten their borders to exclude unwanted immigrants. An example is the increasing mob justice and
lynching of immigrants in South Africa for allegedly confiscating jobs belonging to citizens. Immigrants,
particularly, undocumented ones are often excluded from the sphere of human existence including
the abrogation of all political and civic rights (Papastergiadis, 2006; Tyler, 2006). In the context of these
actions, Agamben indicates that “it would be more honest and, above all, more useful to carefully
investigate…[the] deployments of power by which human beings could be so completely deprived of
their rights…that no act committed against them could appear any longer a crime” (Agamben, 1998,
p.171). Following this proposition, examining antimigration policies from the perspective of biopolitics
would shed light on the current concerns about the exclusion of undocumented immigrant
population. Migration is increasing in nature, impact and complexity. While there are no concrete
statistics regarding the world immigrant population, the United Nations Population Fund indicates that
approximately 3.3% of the world’s population is living in foreign countries including undocumented
migrants (UNFPA, 2016). Perhaps, this growth has warranted the increasing response of governments
through different measures to control and eliminate the growing numbers of the immigrant
population. It, therefore, becomes imperative that researchers should examine anti-migration policies
to understand the relations of power in modern politics. Agamben whose works have largely been
influenced by Foucault’s idea of biopolitics indicates that man’s biological existence is the focus of
modern politics (Agamben, 1998). Thus, modern politics has politicized what he refers to as bare life,
which is man’s mere biological existence since birth (Agamben, 1998). The politicization of life implies
that bare life is encompassed in the strategies of the state and becomes the target of its policies.
Agamben argues that it is only through a biopolitical approach that we can better understand and
address the “enigmas” of modern politics (Agamben, 2010, pp.15-16). If the rationality of biopolitics is
a common element among countries then applying this framework can be an important pathway to
understanding anti-migration policies in today’s world. The undocumented immigrant population is
an exceptional topic for analysis mainly to create a more nuanced picture and understanding of
modern sovereignty and state’s biopower, given the fact that she by “breaking the continuity
between man and citizen” reveals the “distance between birth and nation” which in that moment
reveals the bare life that is otherwise a presumed secret in modern politics” (Agamben, 2010, pp. 142-
143). Thus, while several competing perspectives contribute significantly to the ongoing debate and
epistemologies on anti-migration policies, analyzing these strategies through a biopolitical lens will help
improve our understanding of governments’ anti-migration policies. A biopolitical analysis of anti-
migration procedures may not only be for academic purpose but also for policy formulation and
implementation. This analysis is particularly timely considering the unceasing migration from developing
countries to developed nations due to acute socio-economic, political and environmental conditions.
 Citizenship Turn
Their critique overdetermines citizenship and reinstates the divide between political
life and bare life, destroying agency—the distinction between status quo immigration
and the world of the plan matters because only the concrete analysis of the 1ac takes
into account the lived experiences of the objects of biopolitical management.
Lee 2010 [Charles, “Bare Life, Interstices, and the Third Spaces of Citizenship,” Women’s Studies
Quarterly, 38.1/2]

In the following, I will first address the relevance of Agamben’s work for studies of undocumented
migration. Two elements in his conception of camp are particularly compelling for the condition of
refugees and undocumented migrants: the immanence of interstitiality and the depoliticized state of
bare life.1 In turn, I look at how critics have problematized Agamben’s thesis and its connection to
unauthorized migration by raising issues such as location and agency in an effort to “resurrect the
political” for the abject. In particular, they point to acts of refugee antideportation campaigns and
undocumented-worker protests as counterexamples of “acts of citizenship” or “noncitizen citizenship”
that defy the image of camp as bodies of victims. Yet while chronicling such resistant acts constitutes
an urgent political intervention that counters the state of abjection, by understanding citizenship as
solely visible and audible political acts, this line of critique actually falls into Agamben’s rigid binary
that divides humanity into political life (citizenship) and bare life (no rights, nonparticipation)—with
the only difference being that the latter, by way of her citizen-like political acts, can now transform
and elevate into the position of the former. Importantly, both Agamben and his critics alike have yet
to extend his analysis of the interstitiality of sovereign power to examine the corresponding,
interstitial agency of the abject that sidesteps the binary of bare life and citizenship life.
 Rights Turn
Don’t reject the language of human rights—it is embedded in the testimony of the
victims of sovereign violence
Deranty, professor of French and German Philosophy at Macquarie University, 2004
(Jean-Philippe, “Agamben’s challenge to normative theories of modern rights,” borderlands e-journal
3(1))

9. Consistent with this foundationalist essentialism, Agamben does not restrict indistinction to the
conceptual or structural level, but extends it to empirical, historical phenomena. The archaic State is
not substantially different from the modern one. There is no essential difference between democracy
before Auschwitz, the totalitarian States themselves, and democracy after Auschwitz between liberal
democracies and dictatorships (Agamben 1998:10). In Auschwitz, there is no difference between
victim and executioner (Agamben 1999a: 21). No distinction between the sacred priest, the criminal
banned from the archaic community and the modern citizen; no distinction between the bodies in
Auschwitz and the bodies of victims of car accidents in modern Europe (1998: 114); no distinction
between the Muselmann in the extermination camp and the immigrant locked up by police in a hotel at
Charles de Gaulle Airport (1998: 174), or between the Muselmann and the overcomatose person
(1999a: 156); no distinction between the Nazi extermination camps and the camps established in the
former Yugoslavia. 10. On a general, philosophical level, the essentialist method that leads to general
indistinguishability would be questioned by other traditions of thought. The strongest critique would
probably come from the Hegelian tradition, for which the essence is to be found nowhere but in its
modes of appearance, identity in differences. The conceptual imperative that ensues is the task of
thinking precisely what appears as different, and not look for a transcendent "thing-in-itself" in which all
differences are swallowed. If indeed there are historiographical differences between democracy and
fascism (1998: 10), then perhaps it should bear more weight in the theory, and not be blurred into
indistinction. From a Hegelian perspective, Agamben’s conceptuality looks very much like a Schellingian
night where all cows are black. This in itself is obviously not a ground for rejection, as all theory starts
from a theoretical decision which is itself ungrounded and the matter of pure freedom, as Fichte
demonstrated. Thought, like politics, is all about the decision and its implications. 11. In the case of
empirical examples, the erasure of difference between phenomena seems particularly counter-
intuitive in the case of dissimilar modes of internment. From a practical point of view, it seems
counter-productive to claim that there is no substantial difference between archaic communities and
modern communities provided with the language of rights, between the lawlessness of war times and
democratic discourse. There must be a way of problematising the ideological mantra of Western
freedom, of modernity’s moral superiority, that does not simply equate it with Nazi propaganda (Ogilvie
2001). Habermas and Honneth probably have a point when they highlight the advances made by
modernity in the entrenchment of rights. If the ethical task is that of testimony, then our testimony
should go also to all the individual lives that were freed from alienation by the establishment of legal
barriers against arbitrariness and exclusion. We should heed Honneth’s reminder that struggles for
social and political emancipation have often privileged the language of rights over any other discourse
(Fraser, Honneth 2003). To reject the language of human rights altogether could be a costly gesture in
understanding past political struggles in their relevance for future ones, and a serious strategic,
political loss for accompanying present struggles. We want to criticise the ideology of human rights, but
not at the cost of renouncing the resources that rights provide. Otherwise, critical theory would be in
the odd position of casting aspersions upon the very people it purports to speak for, and of depriving
itself of a major weapon in the struggle against oppression.

Rights check the most violent manifestations of biopolitics

Kalyvas, professor of political theory at UMich, 2005 [Andreas, Politics, Metaphysics, and
Death: Essays on Giogio Agamben’s Homo Sacer,” pp. 115-116]

Moreover, Agamben’s critique of rights has its own obscure moments. While the coming community
will have no need for rights, at the same time Agamben emphasizes that a constitutive fact of the
concentration camps was that “every juridical protection had disappeared.”48 In fact, before entering
the camps, the Jews were deprived of their citizenship rights by the Nuremberg laws. For it to wield
absolute, unmediated power, the camp had to rely on this legal dispossession and was dependent on
the creation of rightless people. In a telling passage, Agamben argues that the National Socialist state, by
divesting some groups of their rights, debased them into naked life. “Inasmuch as its inhabitants (i.e., of
the camps] have been stripped of every political status and reduced completely to naked life,” he
maintains, “the camp is also the most absolute biopolitical space that has ever been realized—a space in
which power confronts nothing other than pure biological life without any mediation.” A few lines later,
he acknowledges that “it would be more honest, and above all more useful, to investigate carefully
how—that is, thanks to what juridical procedures and political devices—human beings could have been
so completely deprived of their rights and prerogatives to the point that committing any act toward
them would no longer appear as a crime (at this point, in fact, truly anything had become.” What these
passages suggest is nor only that the operation of the camp “requires” that individual rights and
freedoms be dispensed with in order to fully marshal sovereign biopower against the detainees, but also
that these rights constitute prerogatives that go beyond mere formality. Rights mediate between the
individual and political power and thereby hinder the absolute deployment of biopolitics. If, however,
the state of exception requires individuals to have been previously deprived of their rights, it is
reasonable to infer that had these rights not been revoked, the camp might not have been possible.
Unfortunately, this important dimension of rights, suggested by Agamben’s description of the camp, is
never thematized or discussed in relation to his previous critique, according to which because rights
politicize zoe they remain within the logic of sovereign biopolitics.52 There are two lines of arguments
that implicate rights, two readings that coexist uneasily in Agamben’s texts. While in the one, the camp
has to divest its inhabitants of their rights in order to reduce them to naked life, in the other the
granting of rights is one of the constitutive operations by which biopower is exercised over the naked
life of its subjects. And if one adds to this Agamben’s assertion that the new politics will be “a nonstatal
and nonjuridical politics,” his vision of the coming community, beyond rights and legal norms, comes
dangerously close to one of an extralegal, permanent (though sovereignless) exception.
 Saving Lives Turn
Our framework of trying to save lives is good: thanatopolitics can explode the
exceptional limits of biopolitics.
Murray 2008 [Stuart, “Thanatopolitics: Reading Agamben in Rejoinder to Biopolitical Life,”
Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 5.2]

Foucault marks the important shift from classical biopower to modern biopolitics. Classical biopower is
summed up as the sovereign decision ‘‘to take life or let live,’’ whereas modern biopolitics is conceived
as ‘‘the power to ‘make’ live and ‘let’ die.’’8 The decision to kill or let live is replaced with a productive
biopolitics that is twofold, that ‘‘makes live’’ and ‘‘lets die.’’ Death becomes a consequence*a necessary
part*of living. Such death is too easily elided and dismissed. Nobody is killed, at least not directly, and
nobody’s hands are bloodied, at least not that we can see; the crimes are outsourced to penal colonies,
through ‘‘extraordinary rendition’’ become ordinary, obfuscated by State bureaucracy, and covered up
by one media spectacle after another. These deaths are never ‘‘caused’’ as such; officially, they are
merely ‘‘allowed,’’ a passive event, collateral damage. But biopolitical logic requires them. In order that
204 S. J. Murray ‘‘we’’ may live, live well and live fully, ‘‘they’’ must die, the distinction between the
virtuous citizen and the other excluded as bare life, disposable life. Here we might think of the neomort
kept ‘‘alive’’ for organ harvesting, the deaths resulting from pharmaceutical testing in poorer parts of
the globe, or the repatriated corpses of US soldiers forbidden from entering ‘‘public speech’’ through a
media moratorium. In the space that remains, I will take up the question of death in order to protest the
biopolitical logic that continues to define its terms. I believe that Agamben’s conception of biopolitics is
not radical enough because it is informed by the logic of the exception--essentially a juridical logic
derived from Schmitt. Agamben states that the exception is an inclusive-exclusion or an exclusive-
inclusion,9 both included and excluded from the juridical.10 Here the juridical appears to be more
originary and encompassing than the political. This follows from what some might call a problematic
reading of Aristotle on Agamben’s part, and so I will return to Aristotle to suggest how both the living
and the dead fall within the sphere of the political, marking a ‘‘threshold’’ (one of Agamben’s frequently
used terms) that is perhaps not just within the sovereign’s power to bridge juridically. In other words,
Aristotle’s more radical conception of the political allows us to see how death exceeds, in some sense,
the juridical logic of the exception. Following recent work,11 we might look toward what I would call
the productive bafflement of death as a way to interrupt, to momentarily suspend, or to meaningfully
subvert biopolitical logic through thanatopolitics. While space does not here permit a full discussion of
whether Aristotle includes zoe¯ within the sphere of the political, it is worth citing a passage that
Agamben himself cites when he distinguishes ‘‘the simple fact of living’’ from ‘‘politically qualified
life,’’12 zoe¯ from bios. The polis, according to Aristotle, ‘‘comes into being for the sake of living [tou
ze¯n], but continues to be for the sake of living well [tou eu ze¯n].’’13 Thus, it is the good life, happiness,
or Aristotelian eudaimonia that binds a community together, and sustains that community over time as
a polis, politically. While Agamben begins with and focuses exclusively on life and its negation through
juridical decisionism (‘‘to take life or let live’’), it is important to note that for the Ancient Greeks life
and death go hand-in-hand. Attic tragedy makes this clear, and we glimpse this in Aristotle, too, when
he reflects on eudaimonia in the Nicomachean Ethics. Should eudaimonia be attributed to the dead?
While he defines eudaimonia as virtuous activity of the soul, and thus not properly a part of death,
Aristotle nevertheless admits that he is baffled when describing what causes eudaimonia: ‘‘It would be
odd . . . if the dead man were to share in these changes and become at one time happy, at another
wretched; while it would also be odd if the fortunes of the descendants did not for some time have
some effect on the happiness of their ancestors.’’14 Certainly, these effects make sense if we believe
that our honors and disgraces are intimately entwined with those of our friends and relatives, both living
and dead. Surely we lose some of our humanity if we see death as no more than the cessation or
negation of life, little more than the registration and identification of determinate biometrical data.
Indeed, Aristotle proceeds to claim that we who are Thanatopolitics 205 living must be mindful of our
actions and how they will affect the dead because to fail to do so would be ‘‘too unfriendly [lian
aphilon]’’ and would contravene accepted beliefs.15 Eudaimonia seems to cross the threshold of life
and death, suggesting a kind of political agency in death itself, a power that might act on us to bind
together or to sustain a living community in friendship and shared beliefs and values. While we might
deride or dismiss this as ancient superstition, we must wonder why we turn our faces from the dead,
why the Bush Administration forbids us to see images of the war dead, why they cover up
photographs from Abu Ghraib and Guanta´namo, and why there is a taboo against the defilement of
the dead. And what should we make of those lives that are martyred and exalted only in death? How
are they memorialized? Do we not have a responsibility, a calling, a regard for the dead? Might this ethic
promise an alternative political representation, one that refuses the negation of embodied experience
and challenges the seemingly absolute morality of biopolitical life? A politics of death might, then, be a
strategy for the productive rethinking of biopolitics, from the technological apparatus that kills to the
media apparatus that defines its terms and mobilizes public perception and morality. Agamben writes:
‘‘What the State cannot tolerate in any way . . . is that the singularities form a community without
affirming an identity, that humans co-belong without any representable condition of belonging.’’16
Across the threshold that separates life and death, we might accept the living and the dead as co-
belonging in such a way that thwarts the concretion of identity, identity politics, and representability.
We might appreciate in death a pre-political community ethic that is more than the negation of life or
the moral failure to live, more than the production of biopolitical life that is presumed to be
foundational.
 Strategic Engagement Turn
The best way to contest biopolitics is to reinstate power relations, because biopolitics
neutralizes and depoliticizes everything.
Edkins, Professor of International Politics at the University of Wales Aberystwyth, and Pin-Fat,
Lecturer in International Relations in the Centre for International Politics at the University of
Manchester, 2005 [Jenny and Veronique, “Through the Wire: Relations of

In this section, we suggest that when the insights of Foucault and Agamben are combined there are
unexpected implications for the notion of resistance, implications that are to be found in the
depoliticised and technologised administrative depths of the camp. We argue that both Foucault and
Agamben are gesturing towards the conclusion that bare life is a life where power relations are absent,
and, correspondingly, that life constituted within biopolitics cannot be a political life. This moves us then
towards the somewhat surprising conclusion that far from seeking to escape power relations, we
should be attempting to reinstate them, and with them the possibility (and possibilities or
potentialities) of politics.42 Sovereign power, despite its name, is not a properly political power
relation, we will argue, but a relationship of violence. For Foucault, power relations are a very specific
form of social relation: ‘power relations ... are distinct from objective capacities as well as from relations
of communication’. Power as a relation is distinct from ‘technical’ or ‘objective’ capacities. In addition, a
power relation is to be seen as distinct from a relationship of violence. A relationship of violence acts
‘immediately and directly on others’, whereas a relationship of power ‘acts upon their actions’.44 Slaves
in chains, for example, are not in a power relation but in a relationship of violence. Where the
determining factors are exhaustive, there is no relationship of power: slavery is not a power relationship
when a man is in chains, only when he has some possible mobility, even a chance of escape.... At the
very heart of the power relationship, and constantly provoking it, are the recalcitrance of the will and
the intransigence of freedom.45 For Foucault power relations and freedom occupy the same moment
of possibility. Resistance is inevitable whenever and wherever there are power relations. Without
power relations there is no possibility of resistance and no freedom. Taking this insight from Foucault
and turning the question of power on its head, we can begin to ask what examples there might be, in
practice, of a mode of being where resistance is impossible, and hence where there is no power relation.
It can be argued, following Agamben, that the concentration camp is such an example. In the camp the
majority of prisoners become what is termed in camp jargon ‘Muselmänner.’ Primo Levi describes these
as ‘the drowned’: Their life is short, but their number is endless; they ... form the backbone of the camp,
an anonymous mass, continually renewed and always identical, of non-men who march and labour in
silence, the divine spark dead within them, already too empty to really suffer. One hesitates to call them
living: one hesitates to call their death death, in the face of which they have no fear, as they are too
tired to understand.46 The drowned are ‘bare life’ – their concerns are limited to where the next
mouthful of food is coming from – and they are also homines sacri, sacred men: they can be killed at will
by the camp guards, without ceremony and without justification having to be offered or provocation
demonstrated. More significantly for the argument here, the drowned offer no resistance. Indeed they
are indifferent to their fate. They are reduced to a state where they are unable even to commit suicide:
they do not have the possibility of killing themselves as, even if there were ways in which they could
engineer their own death, they no longer have the will either to live or die. In Foucault’s terms, then, for
the drowned of the concentration camp there are no relations of power, only relations of violence.
The camp then is an example of where power relations vanish. What we have in the camps is not a
power relation. All we have is the administration of bare life. In the camps, for those inmates who
reached the depths, who faced the Gorgon, there were no relations of power, only relations of violence.
As we have noted, Agamben importantly argues that what took place in the camp as a zone of
indistinction has extended in the contemporary world to encompass regions outside the camp as well. In
the face of a biopolitics that technologises, administers and depoliticises, and thereby renders the
political and power relations irrelevant, we have all become homines sacri or bare life.

Their overbroad critique of biopolitics has no hope of understanding historically

specific manifestations of biopolitics, making it a useless and depoliticized theoretical
enterprise. Politicizing specific manifestations of biopolitics is critical to resistance.
Sinnerbrink, professor of philosophy at Macquarie University, 2005 [Robert, “Critique
Hope, Power: Challenges of Contemporary Critical Theory,” Critical Horizons 6(1)]

The problem with all three accounts is that they each, in different ways, evince a tension between
ontological and ontic levels of analysis. This tension emerges, as we have seen, in explicating the
relationship between the ontological aspects of biopower as the ground of politics in modernity, and
the ontic dimension of specific social practices and collective political action within historically specific
biopower regimes. Despite its breathtaking historical sweep, the biopolitical paradigm displays a
marked loss of specificity in its analyses of contemporary biopolitical phenomena. Universal and
particular dimensions of biopower (or ontological and ontic levels) collapse into each other such that
there is no substantive difference between, for Heidegger, mechanised agriculture and Nazi
concentration camps, or for Agamben, between the Muselmann, the refugee, and the overcomatose
patient.68 The metaphysical articulation of the concept of biopolitics, in sum, generates a kind of
conceptual short-circuit between ontological and ontic levels of analysis that renders inoperative a
genuinely political conception of biopower.69 We are left with ‘biopolitics’ in the sense of bio-policing
or bio-management in Foucault’s account of the biopolitical governmentality of neo-liberalism. Or we
remain within Agamben’s biopolitical nihilism in which all distinctions between biopolitical
phenomena and regimes are subsumed within a generalised ‘zone of indistinction’. This condition of
biopolitical nihilism, in turn, can only be redeemed by a messianic event of historical and political
transfiguration, by the radical overcoming of the originary ontological breach between politics and
being.
 Sovereignty Takeout
We should employ state sovereignty when the specificity of a situation demands it
Derrida, Directeur d’Etudes at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, and Professor
of Philosophy, French and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine, 2004 [For What
Tomorrow? A Dialogue with Elisabeth Roudinesco, pp. 91-92]

J.D.: A moment ago you spoke of regicide as the necessity of an exception, in sum. Well, yes, one can
refer provisionally to Carl Schmitt (whatever one may think of him, his arguments are always useful for
problematizing the “political” or the “juridical”; I examined this question in Politics of Friendship). He
says in effect that a sovereign is defined by his capacity to decide the exception. Sovereign is he who
effectively decides the exception. The revolutionaries decided that at that moment that it was necessary
to suspend justice and—in order to establish the law [droit] and to give the Revolution its rights—to
suspend the rule of law [l’Etat de droit]. Schmitt also gives this definition of sovereignty: to have the
right to suspend the law, or the rule of law, the constitutional state. Without this category of exception,
we cannot understand the concept of sovereignty. Today, the great question is indeed, everywhere,
that of sovereignty. Omnipresent in our discourses and in our axioms, under its own name or another,
literally or figuratively, this concept has a theological origin: the true sovereign is God. The concept of
this authority or of this power was transferred to the monarch, said to have a “divine right.” Sovereignty
was then delegated to the people, in the form of democracy, or to the nation, with the same theological
attributes as those attributed to the king and to God. Today, wherever the word “sovereignty” is
spoken, this heritage remains undeniable, whatever internal differentiation one may recognize in it.
How do we deal with this? Here we return to the question of heritage with which we began. It is
necessary to deconstruct the concept of sovereignty, never to forget its theological filiation and to be
ready to call this filiation into question wherever we discern its effects. This supposes an inflexible
critique of the logic of the state and of the nation-state. And yet—hence the enormous responsibility
of the citizen and of the heir in general, in certain situations—the state, in its actual form, can resist
certain forces that I consider the most threatening. What I here call “responsibility” is what dictates
the decision to be sometimes for the sovereign state and sometimes against it, for its deconstruction
(“theoretical and practical,” as one used to say) according to the singularity of the contexts and the
stakes. There is no relativism in this, no renunciation of the injunction to “think” and to deconstruct
the heritage. This aporia is in truth the very condition of decision and responsibility—if there is any. I
am thinking for example of the incoherent but organized coalition of international capitalist forces
that, in the name of neoliberalism or the market,31 are taking hold of the world in conditions such as
the “state” form; this is what can still resist the most. For the moment. But it is necessary to reinvent
the conditions of resistance. Once again, I would say that according to the situations, I am an
antisovereignist or a sovereignist—and I vindicate the right to be antisovereignist at certain times and
a sovereignist at others. No one can make me respond to this question as though it were a matter of
pressing a button on some old-fashioned machine. There are cases in which I would support a logic of
the state, but I ask to examine each situation before making any statement. It is also necessary to
recognize that by requiring someone to be not unconditionally sovereignist but rather soyvereignist
only under certain conditions, one is already calling into question the principle of sovereignty.
Deconstruction begins there. It demands a difficult dissociation, almost impossible but indispensable,
between unconditionality (justice without power) and sovereignty (right, power, or potency).
Deconstruction is on the side of unconditionaliry, even when it seems impossible, and not sovereignty,
even when it seems possible.
 Strategic Engagement Takeout
Every repressive instance of power produces resistance
Lemke, assistant professor of sociology at Wuppertal University, 2005 [Thomas, ““A Zone
of Indistinction” – A Critique of Giorgio Agamben’s Concept of Biopolitics,” at
http://www.thomaslemkeweb.de/engl.%20texte/A%20Zone3.pdf, accessed 12 July 2018]

In fact the “camp” is by no means a homogenous zone where differences collapse but a site where
differences are produced. Here again the contrast between Agamben and Foucault is instructive. For
Foucault biopolitics is not a sovereign decision over life and death. The historical and political novelty of
biopolitics lies in the fact that it focuses on the productive value of individuals and populations; the
ancient sovereign power that was centred on death is reorganised around the imperative of life. In this
perspective Foucault analyses modern racism as a vital technology since it guarantees the function of
death in an economy of bio-power. Racism allows for a fragmentation of the social that facilitates a
hierarchical differentiation between good and bad races. The killing of others is motivated by the vision
of an improvement or purification of the higher race (Foucault 1997: 213-235). From this point, the
second difference between Agamben and Foucault emerges. Agamben claims that from antiquity on
there was a structural link between sovereignty and biopolitics, leading to an always renewed and ever
more radicalised separation between bare life and legal existence. Foucault, on the other hand, makes
an analytical distinction between biopolitics and sovereignty, even though he notes their “deep
historical link” (Foucault 1991: 102). Only the Foucauldian analytical frame allows the material limits
and the historical specifity of sovereignty to become visible by presenting it less as the origin than as
an effect of power relations. Foucault shows that sovereign power is by no means sovereign, since its
legitimacy and efficiency depends on a “microphysics of power”, whereas in Agamben’s work
sovereignty produces and dominates bare life. For Agamben “the production of a biopolitical body is
the original activity of sovereign power” (1998: 6; emphasis in orig.). The binary confrontation of bíos
and zoé, political existence and bare life, rule and exception points exactly to the very juridical model
of power that Foucault has criticized so convincingly. Agamben pursues a concept of power that is
grounded in categories of repression, reproduction and reduction, without taking into account the
relational, decentralised and productive aspect of power. In that it remains inside the horizon of law,
Agamben’s analysis is more indebted to Carl Schmitt (1932) than to Michel Foucault. For Schmitt, the
sovereign is visible in the decision about the state of exception, in the suspension of the law, while for
Foucault the normal state that operates beneath, alongside, or against juridical mechanisms is more
important. While the former concentrates on how the norm is suspended, the latter focuses on the
production of normality. Schmitt takes as the point of departure the very sovereignty, that signifies, for
Foucault, the endpoint and result of complex social processes, which concentrate the forces inside the
social body in such a way as to produce the impression that there is an autonomous centre, or a
sovereign source of power.6
 Permutation – Top-Level
Any alternative to biopolitics is necessarily incomplete unless it includes an acute
awareness of political realities and a desire to lessen human suffering.
Sinnerbrink, professor of philosophy at Macquarie University, 2005 [Robert, “Critique
Hope, Power: Challenges of Contemporary Critical Theory,” Critical Horizons 6(1)]

Foucault and Agamben leave us with a stark alternative: either to take the ethical turn towards
practices of freedom compatible with neo-liberalist governmentality, or accelerate biopolitical
nihilism in the hope that a messianic overcoming of the breach between bare life and sovereign
power will institute a redeemed human community. In short, affirm pragmatic practices of ethical self-
formation, or prepare for the messianic overcoming of biopolitical domination. These alternatives,
however, seem partial and inadequate. Foucault’s turn to ethics and liberalism underplays the political
urgency of confronting societies of biopolitical control; this is a point not lost on Deleuze and taken up
by Hardt and Negri in their neo-Marxist version of biopolitical production.70 Agamben’s despairing
account of biopolitical nihilism, on the other hand, overemphasises the ontological ‘sameness’ of
biopower regimes, and retreats from concrete politics into a metaphysical messianism prophetically
gesturing towards a utopian community to come. What my brief genealogy of biopower and biopolitics
suggests, then, is the need to find a path between these alternatives. We should retain the
Foucaultian emphasis on a critical analysis of biopower without acquiescing to an ethical
accommodation with neo-liberalism. And we ought to affirm Agamben’s profound questioning of the
biopolitical foundations of modernity without succumbing to a utopian metaphysical messianism. We
also need to question the Heideggerian metaphysical critique of modernity that has profoundly marked
both Foucaultian and Agambenian conceptions of biopower and biopolitics. Finally, this genealogy
suggests the need to restore the experience of injustice, the suffering of human beings, to any
philosophical account of biopolitics, and to articulate political responses to biopower that go beyond
ethical acquiescence and metaphysical longing.
 Permutation – Contingency
Perm: do the plan and all parts of the alternative not mutually exclusive with the plan.
The perm solves best – make our engagements with biopolitics contingent upon the
epistemological insights of critique while also acting to alleviate suffering
Deranty, professor of French and German Philosophy at Macquarie University, 2004
(Jean-Philippe, “Agamben’s challenge to normative theories of modern rights,” borderlands e-journal
3(1))

46. How can we heed Agamben’s warning about the necessity to continue to question the normativity
of modernity after Auschwitz without dissolving politics into onto-theology? This seems to be one of
the most pressing demands for political thought today. 47. If, with Rancière, we define politics not
through the institution of sovereignty, but as a continual struggle for the recognition of basic equality,
and thereby strongly distinguish politics from the police order viewed as the functional management of
communities (Rancière 1999), then it is possible to acknowledge the normative break introduced by
the democratic revolutions of the modern age without falling into a one-sided view of modernity as a
neat process of rationalisation. What should be stressed about modernity is not primarily the list of
substantive inalienable and imprescriptible human rights, but the equal entitlement of all to claim any
rights at all. This definition of politics must be accompanied by the parallel acknowledgment that the
times that saw the recognition of the fundamental equality of all also produced the total negation of this
principle. But this parallel claim does not necessarily render the first invalid. Rather it points to a tension
inherent in modern communities, between the political demands of equality and the systemic
tendencies that structurally produce stigmatisation and exclusion. 48. One can acknowledge the
descriptive appeal of the biopower hypothesis without renouncing the antagonistic definition of
politics. As Rancière remarks, Foucault’s late hypothesis is more about power than it is about politics
(Rancière 2002). This is quite clear in the 1976 lectures (Society must be defended) where the term that
is mostly used is that of "biopower". As Rancière suggests, when the "biopower" hypothesis is
transformed into a "biopolitical" thesis, the very possibility of politics becomes problematic. There is a
way of articulating modern disciplinary power and the imperative of politics that is not disjunctive.
The power that subjects and excludes socially can also empower politically simply because the
exclusion is already a form of address which unwittingly provides implicit recognition. Power includes
by excluding, but in a way that might be different from a ban. This insight is precisely the one that
Foucault was developing in his last writings, in his definition of freedom as "agonism" (Foucault 1983:
208-228): "Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free" (221). The
hierarchical, exclusionary essence of social structures demands as a condition of its possibility an
equivalent implicit recognition of all, even in the mode of exclusion. It is on the basis of this recognition
that politics can sometimes arise as the vindication of equality and the challenge to exclusion. 49. This
proposal rests on a logic that challenges Agamben’s reduction of the overcoming of the classical
conceptualisation of potentiality and actuality to the single Heideggerian alternative. Instead of
collapsing or dualistically separating potentiality and actuality, one would find in Hegel’s modal logic a
way to articulate their negative, or reflexive, unity, in the notion of contingency. Contingency is precisely
the potential as existing, a potential that exists yet does not exclude the possibility of its opposite (Hegel
1969: 541-554). Hegel can lead the way towards an ontology of contingency that recognises the place of
contingency at the core of necessity, instead of opposing them. The fact that the impossible became real
vindicates Hegel’s claim that the impossible should not be opposed to the actual. Instead, the possible
and the impossible are only reflected images of each other and, as actual, are both simply the
contingent. Auschwitz should not be called absolute necessity (Agamben 1999a: 148), but absolute
contingency. The absolute historical necessity of Auschwitz is not "the radical negation" of contingency,
which, if true, would indeed necessitate a flight out of history to conjure up its threat. Its absolute
necessity in fact harbours an indelible core of contingency, the locus where political intervention could
have changed things, where politics can happen. Zygmunt Bauman’s theory of modernity and his theory
about the place and relevance of the Holocaust in modernity have given sociological and contemporary
relevance to this alternative historical-political logic of contingency (Bauman 1989). 50. In the social and
historical fields, politics is only the name of the contingency that strikes at the heart of systemic
necessity. An ontology of contingency provides the model with which to think together both the
possibility, and the possibility of the repetition of, catastrophe, as the one heritage of modernity, and
the contingency of catastrophe as logically entailing the possibility of its opposite. Modernity is
ambiguous because it provides the normative resources to combat the apparent necessity of possible
systemic catastrophes. Politics is the name of the struggle drawing on those resources. 51. This
ontology enables us also to rethink the relationship of modern subjects to rights. Modern subjects are
able to consider themselves autonomous subjects because legal recognition signals to them that they
are recognised as full members of the community, endowed with the full capacity to judge. This account
of rights in modernity is precious because it provides an adequate framework to understand real
political struggles, as fights for rights. We can see now how this account needs to be complemented by
the notion of contingency that undermines the apparent necessity of the progress of modernity.
Modern subjects know that their rights are granted only contingently, that the possibility of the
impossible is always actual. This is why rights should not be taken for granted. But this does not imply
that they should be rejected as illusion, on the grounds that they were disclosed as contingent in the
horrors of the 20th century. Instead, their contingency should be the reason for constant political
vigilance. 52. By questioning the rejection of modern rights, one is undoubtedly unfaithful to the letter
of Benjamin. Yet, if one accepts that one of the great weaknesses of the Marxist philosophy of
revolution was its inability to constructively engage with the question of rights and the State, then it
might be the case that the politics that define themselves as the articulation of demands born in the
struggles against injustice are better able to bear witness to the "tradition of the oppressed" than
their messianic counterparts.
 Permutation – Engagement Solves (Levinasian) Ethics
The structured resistance to biopolitics recommended by Agamben fails to
fundamentally alter the structured materiality of modern liberal juridical order—
especially the specifics of migrant agency.
Lee 2010 [Charles, “Bare Life, Interstices, and the Third Spaces of Citizenship,” Women’s Studies
Quarterly, 38.1/2]

Agamben’s transhistorical call notwithstanding, to what extent is the space of “camp” (and by
implication, the largely suppressed agency of bare life caught within the camp) an adequate depiction of
the social condition of undocumented migrants? Examining the workspace of private households where
female migrants work as domestic workers and where labor laws and regulations are indefinitely
suspended, in this essay I argue that, while these laboring spaces relate to camp as the undocumented
workers are stripped of juridico-political rights and reduced to a state of exploited bare life, the con
ception of camp lacks a dynamic account of power relations to address the complex agency of migrant
subjects as they negotiate their daily workspace. Significantly, what begins for Agamben as a space of
interstitiality posited in camp—a zone between life and death, inside and outside—ultimately slides into
an immobile binary between the political beings of citizens and the excluded bodies of bare life. Yet if
the space of camp is interstitial in nature, what preempts the possibility of the abject manifesting an
agency that is also interstitial in character? If the sovereign power occupies a space that is
simultaneously inside and outside the juridical order, so does the undocumented in navigating a
terrain of resistance/negotiation inside and outside the normative arrangement of citizenship. As I
will argue, this negotiated resistance does not fundamentally alter the structured materiality of
modern liberal juridical order and the political economy of irregular migration that Agamben and his
migration studies followers so powerfully portray. However, at the point when Agamben declares the
death of citizenship life for the bare subjects, he omits a crucial spectrum of ambiguous and interstitial
practices mounted by the abject—mediating between the two extreme ends of political and
nonpolitical—that actually extends and reanimates the life of citizenship from the very margins of
abjection.

The ethical demands of Derrida and Levinas are never pure and must be political in
order to be effective.
Ajana 2006 [Btihaj, “Immigration Interrupted,” Journal for Cultural Research, 10.3]
Nevertheless, ‘Everything that takes place “between us” concerns everyone’ (Levinas 1969, p. 212) and
it is never a matter of one foetus only, one Other solely, but a question of otherness in its entirety. As
such, as soon as the ‘third’ party (another other) comes to the scene, this absolute ethical relationship
between self and Other is called into question, for the arrival of the Third complicates the status of the
Other as being the only object of ethical responsibility and transfers this self-Other relationship into the
political/juridical realm, and hence conditionality so that responsibility could be calculated, portioned
and allocated ‘accordingly’ (such operations tend to be value and interest-driven). As mentioned earlier,
it is the way in which conditionality functions by means of institutionalising, organising, standardising
and universalising relationships that notions of singularity and alterity are betrayed and negated in the
process of legislation and (de)politicisation creating a ‘sociality that does not allow a generosity that
would foster … the improvement of survival of anyone other than those bodies that already dominate’
(Diprose 2002, p. 171). Yet, this inevitable conditionality trigged by the arrival of the third is what
indicates that hospitality could never be regarded merely form the vantage point of ethics (since in
reality, the IMMIGRATION INTERRUPTED 271 ‘I’ does not engage solely with ‘one’ Other) but also in
terms of politics (by virtue of the arrival of the third who constitutes a multitude of others). Hospitality,
in this sense, is concurrently straddling the ethical as well as the political sphere and in so doing, it
reveals that ‘the determinability of this limit [between the ethical and the political] was never pure and
it never will be’ (Derrida in Diprose 2002, p. 186). This statement suggests that despite the apparent
hiatus between ethics and politics, there is no strict separation between the two after all, and that the
realisation of an ethico-political hospitality is possible only insofar as one is willing to resolve or at least
navigate the malleable bifurcation between that which embodies calculable and conceptual practice
(politics) and that which embodies unconditionality and radical responsibility (ethics) without disposing
of one in favour of the other. Such an act will intrinsically necessitate the unworking (Nancy 1991) of
immanentism in order to attend to an alternative politics which takes ethics as its premise rather than
absolute figurations of myth, technicism and enclosure.

The relationship between calculation and critique is dialectic—advances in the one

demand reappropriations from the other. This means that you vote aff because there
is no pure space from which to articulate critique and the ethical goals of critique are
an infinite telos toward which we continually work rather than an idea which can be
simply “thought” into existence.
Derrida 1992 [Jacques, “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority,’” in Deconstruction and
the Possibility of Justice, pp. 28-29]

That justice exceeds law and calculation, that the unpresentable exceeds the determinable cannot
and should not serve as an alibi for staying out of juridico-political battles, within an institution or a
state or between institutions or states and others. Left to itself, the incalculable and giving (donatrice)
idea of justice is always very close to the bad, even to the worst for it can always be reappropriated by
the most perverse calculation. It's always possible. And so incalculable justice requires us to calculate.
And first, closest to what we associate with justice, namely, law, the juridical field that one cannot
isolate within sure frontiers, but also in all the fields from which we cannot separate it, which intervene
in it and are no longer simply fields: ethics, politics, economics, psycho-sociology, philosophy, literature,
etc. Not only must we calculate, negotiate the relation between the calculable and the incalculable,
and negotiate without the sort of rule that wouldn't have to be reinvented there where we are cast,
there where we find ourselves; but we must take it as far as possible, beyond the place we find
ourselves and beyond the -already identifiable zones of morality or politics or law, beyond the
distinction between national and international, public and private, and so on. This requirement does
not properly belong either to justice or law. It only belongs to either of these two domains by exceeding
each one in the direction of the other. Politicization, for example, is interminable even if it cannot and
should not ever be total. To keep this from being a truism or a triviality, we must recognize in it the
following consequence: each advance in politicization obliges one to reconsider, and so to reinterpret
the very abundations of law such as they had previously been calculated or delimited. This was true
for example in the Declaration of the Rights of Man, in the abolition of slavery, in all the emancipatory
battles that remain and will have to remain in progress, everywhere in the world, for men and for
women. Nothing seems to me less outdated than the classical emancipatory ideal. We cannot attempt
to disqualify it today, whether crudely or with sophistication, at least not without treating it too
lightly and forming the worst complicities. But beyond these identified territories of juridico-
politicization on the grand geopolitical scale, beyond all self-serving interpretations, beyond all
determined and particular reappropriations of international law, other areas must constantly open up
that at first can seem like secondary or marginal areas. This marginality also signifies that a violence,
indeed a terrorism and other forms of hostage-taking are at work (the examples closest to us would be
found in the area of laws on the teaching and practice of languages, the legitimization of canons, the
military use of scientific research, abortion, euthanasia, problems of organ transplant, extra-uterine
conception; bio-engineering, medical experimentation, the social treatment of AIDS, the macro- or
micro-politics of drugs, the homeless, and so on, without forgetting, of course, the treatment of what we
call animal life, animality. On this last problem, the Benjamin text that I'm coming to now shows that its
author was not deaf or insensitive to it, even if his propositions on this subject remain quite obscure, if
not quite traditional).
 Permutation – Combine Methods
Perm Do Both – Only critical empiricism factors in concrete policy solutions into
analysis of political structures, key to solve structural issues
Koopman, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oregon, 2015 (Collin, “Two Uses of
Michel Foucault in Political Theory: Concepts and Methods in Giorgio Agamben and Ian Hacking”,
Constellations Volume 22, Number 4, EBSCO, Accessed 7/12/18 GDI-GN)

This brings me to a final consideration: the

value of critical empiricism over and against critical transcendentalism
in the context of a critique of the politics of our selves today . I have been arguing on behalf of a more
Hacking-style appropriation of Foucault’s methods against a more Agamben-like expansion of Foucault’s concepts. But
this is not the place for me to pretend to give a convincing argument on behalf of empiricism against
transcendentalism as a general philosophical orientation. The cases for both are already well known: the impasse between these two
stances forms much of the substrate of much of modern philosophy itself. Allow me to close instead by merely stating one crucial advantage of
empirically oriented over transcendentally trained critique with respect to the work that we might expect thought and theory to perform in the
domain of the political. In offering this argument, I want to make plain that I do not believe that one can offer a valid general argument against
transcendental theory. But that sort of argument is unnecessary. For what can nonetheless be shown, I think, are the
advantages of empirical critique over transcendental critique with respect to the work of thought in
politics. These advantages may well apply in other domains as well, but I shall leave that consideration for another occasion. The idea
that empiricism is advantageous over transcendentalism with respect to the political may seem rather
implausible at first blush — as from the perspective of transcendental theory it is often thought that
empirical theory is depoliticizing just insofar as it appears to involve an acceptance of the surface
appearance of things rather than an interrogation of the hidden structures that make them work .62
Empiricism seems to prepare us to leave things as they are , whereas it is often asserted that transcendentalism alone is
capable of facilitating the kinds of radical critique thought to be necessary for intervention in the political. But to assert this of a
Foucauldian critical empiricism would be a mistake. Foucault helps us see how empiricism can indeed
lend itself to projects of political radicalism, and, indeed, do so perhaps more ably than
transcendental approaches that encourage us to wait upon a decisive event to come rather than effect in the
present those small changes that may in time accumulate around decisive political intervention. Empirically focused critique is
crucial for the politics of the present, insofar as the transformation of the practices constitutive of the
political always involves an intervention into political realities themselves . Productively transforming
these realities requires that we gain a conceptual grip on the conditions structuring these realities .
Empirical critique, with its preservation of specificity and mobility, can provide us with this grip. By contrast, the
methodological flattening to generalities typical of transcendental critique is unlikely to give us the grip on political and ethical
realities that we would need to transform them. I am assuming here that it is worth being clear that purposive
political transformation occurs on the level of specificity within the terrain of history rather than on
the level of generality within the transcendental. My view is that every political gain is the particular gain that it is and only
that particular gain, such that realizing its benefits in other contexts requires its actual mobilization to those other contexts. Human rights,
for example, are of benefit only to the extent that they are mobilized from the domains of their
inception to other domains where they might perform profitable work (which leaves open the possibility that they
may not be profitable in every possible domain, at least not without major alteration in terms of their practical and technical functioning). It is
well known that Foucault was obsessed in all his writings with acts of critically testing the limits of
who we are — we might call this his obsession with the politics of our selves.63 The critical transformation of the self that is at the heart of
political transformation requires, among other things, empirically coming to terms with the limits that condition who we can be. In “What is
Enlightenment?” Foucault
wrote: This historico-critical attitude must also be an experimental one. I mean
that this work done at the limits of ourselves must, on the one hand, open up a realm of historical
inquiry and, on the other, put itself to the test of reality, of contemporary reality, both to grasp the
points where change is possible and desirable, and to determine the precise form this change should
take.64 C 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. 582 Constellations Volume 22, Number 4, 2015 The test of reality is the test of
empiricity just insofar as the former is situated on the plane of practice and not the plane of pure
theory. The transformation of our selves that was so central to Foucault must be recognized as the
result of action rather than the conclusion of argument. As such, the transformation of our selves benefits enormously
from a fuller sense of the history of the practices conditioning who we are. These practices are real in all their specificity and detail. Their study
ought to be empirical. Foucault
thus points us towards what should be called a critical empiricism; namely, a
form of critique whereby we can engage who we are in all our rich specificity and contingency.
Foucault thus offers us, among other things, methodological motion for bringing into view the
constitutive features of our presents, and indeed, our very selves. These methods in motion are the truest source of the ongoing
fecundity of his work for us today, at least insofar as we might aim to make use of Foucault to go beyond Foucault.
Impact Responses
 No Impact Generally
There’s no impact to biopower and their insistence on constant references to it is a
scare tactic that deters actual alternatives to biopower
Virno, former professor philosophy of language, semiotics, and the ethics of
communication at the University of Calabria, 2002 [Paolo, “General Intellect, Exodus,
Multitude,” Archipelago 52]

Agamben is a problem. Agamben is a thinker of great value but also, in my opinion, a thinker with no
political vocation. Then, when Agamben speaks of the biopolitical he has the tendency to transform it
into an ontological category with value already since the archaic Roman right. And, in this, in my
opinion, he is very wrong-headed. The problem is, I believe, that the biopolitical is only an effect
derived from the concept of labor-power. When there is a commodity that is called labor-power it is
already implicitly government over life. Agamben says, on the other hand, that labor-power is only one
of the aspects of the biopolitical; I say the contrary: over all because labor power is a paradoxical
commodity, because it is not a real commodity like a book or a bottle of water, but rather is simply the
potential to produce. As soon as this potential is transformed into a commodity, then, it is necessary to
govern the living body that maintains this potential, that contains this potential. Toni (Negri) and
Michael (Hardt), on the other hand, use biopolitics in a historically determined sense, basing it on
Foucault, but Foucault spoke in few pages of the biopolitical - in relation to the birth of liberalism - that
Foucault is not a sufficient base for founding a discourse over the biopolitical and my apprehension, my
fear, is that the biopolitical can be transformed into a word that hides, covers problems instead of
being an instrument for confronting them. A fetish word, an "open doors" word, a word with an
exclamation point, a word that carries the risk of blocking critical thought instead of helping it. Then,
my fear is of fetish words in politics because it seems like the cries of a child that is afraid of the dark...,
the child that says "mama, mama!", "biopolitics, biopolitics!". I don't negate that there can be a
serious content in the term, however I see that the use of the term biopolitics sometimes is a
consolatory use, like the cry of a child, when what serves us are, in all cases, instruments of work and
not propaganda words.
 No War Impacts
Agamben misunderstands war – overemphasizes the role of sovereignty unto itself
rather than communities of sovereigns
Salter, Professor at the School of Political Studies, University of Ottawa, 2012 (Mark B., “Theory of
the / : The Suture and Critical Border Studies,” Geopolitics, Vol. 17, Iss. 4, October, EBSCO, Accessed
7/10/18 GDI-GN)

Agamben starts Homo Sacer with Aristotle and the separation between bare or naked life and political
life.54 First, Agamben draws the distinction between bare life (zoe¯) and the political life (bios), arguing
that the basis of metaphysics and politics is the inclusive exclusion of bare life in political life. The
distinction in Politics Bk III that is crucial for Agamben is “for the sake of mere life (zoe¯) (in which there is possibly
some noble elements so long as the evils of existence do not greatly overbalance the good) mankind meet together and
maintain the political community.”55 This he sees as a correction to Foucault’s characterisation of
biopolitics as the primary turn to 744 Mark B. Salter modernity. Agamben traces the inclusion of bare life
into political life, and consequently the necessary vulnerability of politics to the potential reduction to mere biological existence back to
Aristotle. Political life in this reading is more than bare life, even if contemporary politics has elided the difference so that
the condition of political life now is equivalent to bare life. Inclusion – in both the space of the state and of bare life in
political life – and the potential for the ban or exclusion is the essence of the political . Agamben, in this
move, suffers the same mistaken assumption as Sassen, Brown, and Balibar, focusing entirely on the law
as a domestic or internal function, and representing the border as being entirely and exclusive defined and
decided by the sovereign. The most important inside/outside or inclusion/exclusion function of
contemporary sovereign is the border between the state and the international . Aristotle is the real
source of Agamben’s neglect of the international , because the ancient Greek philosopher grounded his
understanding of the possibility for a polis on the division between Greeks and barbarians , humans
and slaves, the polis and a community: the former has a shared sense of justice, the latter does not. Agamben misses,
however, that the strategies for the maintenance of political community are different, whether a state is
“happy in isolation” or whether it is part of a metacommunity .56 And Aristotle is ambivalent on the
issue of the metacommunity: in one sense, his commitment to all men as possessors of freedom lays the foundation for
cosmopolitanism, expanded upon by the Stoics; in another sense, his division of men into men capable of freedom and barbarians who are
“slaves by nature.”57 This
fundamental division between slaves and men is crucial to understanding
Aristotle’s conception of politics, and completely misread in Agamben. Aristotle relates borders to
self-sufficiency and war. “Everyone would agree in praising the territory which is most entirely self-sufficing ... it should difficult of
access to the enemy and easy of egress to the inhabitants ... [the city] should be a convenient centre for the protection of the whole
country ...”58 When he describes the requirements of the polis, he ranks “first,
there must be food; secondly, arts, for life
requires many instruments; thirdly, there must be arms, for the members of a community have need
of them, and in their own hands, too, in order to maintain authority both against disobedient subjects
and against external assailants; fourthly, there must be a certain amount of revenue , both for internal needs,
and for the purposes of war ... sixthly, and most necessary of all, there must be a power of deciding what is for the
public interest, and what is just in men’s dealings with one another.”59 Agamben misses war in general, and the
constitutive role of borders in the creation of war (as opposed to domestic security or emergency). But he also misses
the importance of war to Aristotle’s conception of politics: “The whole of life is further divided into
two parts, business and leisure, war and peace, and of actions some aim at what is necessary and
useful, and some Theory of the / 745 at what is honorable ... there must be war for the sake of peace.”60 We can see Agamben start to refer
to external threats, and the difference between “peace and war (and between foreign and civil war),” but it is never an integral part
of his argument.61 But, Agamben quickly elides foreign wars and the contemporary war on terror that he terms “a
global civil war” – allowing the state of exception to “increasingly as the dominant paradigm of
government in contemporary politics.”62 Agamben takes Aristotle’s state and his discussions of war to be about
the sovereign only, and not about the relations between sovereigns .
 Law != Violence
Agamben’s rejection of all law as inherently violent is based on misreadings of political
theory and false generalizations – not all law is violent, and we shouldn’t assume that
it is
Deranty, professor of French and German Philosophy at Macquarie University, 2004
(Jean-Philippe, “Agamben’s challenge to normative theories of modern rights,” borderlands e-journal
3(1))

28. All this explains why Agamben chooses to focus on the decisionistic tradition (Hobbes, Heidegger,
Schmitt). With it, he wants to isolate the pure essences of all juridical orders and thus highlight the
essential violence structuring traditional politics. Since the law essentially appears as a production and
capture of bare life, the political order that enunciates and maintains the law is essentially violent,
always threatening the bare life it has produced with total annihilation. Auschwitz is the real outcome of
all normative orders. 29. The problem with this strategic use of the decisionistic tradition is that it does
not do justice to the complex relationship that these authors establish between violence and
normativity, that is, in the end the very normative nature of their theories. In brief, they are not saying
that all law is violent, in essence or in its core, rather that law is dependent upon a form of violence for
its foundation. Violence can found the law, without the law itself being violent. In Hobbes, the social
contract, despite the absolute nature of the sovereign it creates, also enables individual rights to flourish
on the basis of the inalienable right to life (see Barret-Kriegel 2003: 86). 30. In Schmitt, the decision over
the exception is indeed "more interesting than the regular case", but only because it makes the regular
case possible. The "normal situation" matters more than the power to create it since it is its end (Schmitt
1985: 13). What Schmitt has in mind is not the indistinction between fact and law, or their intimate
cohesion, to wit, their secrete indistinguishability, but the origin of the law, in the name of the law. This
explains why the primacy given by Schmitt to the decision is accompanied by the recognition of popular
sovereignty, since the decision is only the expression of an organic community. Decisionism for Schmitt
is only a way of asserting the political value of the community as homogeneous whole, against liberal
parliamentarianism. Also, the evolution of Schmitt’s thought is marked by the retreat of the decisionistic
element, in favour of a strong form of institutionalism. This is because, if indeed the juridical order is
totally dependent on the sovereign decision, then the latter can revoke it at any moment. Decisionism,
as a theory about the origin of the law, leads to its own contradiction unless it is reintegrated in a theory
of institutions (Kervégan 1992). 31. In other words, Agamben sees these authors as establishing a
circularity of law and violence, when they want to emphasise the extra-juridical origin of the law, for
the law’s sake. Equally, Savigny’s polemic against rationalism in legal theory, against Thibaut and his
philosophical ally Hegel, does not amount to a recognition of the capture of life by the law, but aims at
grounding the legal order in the very life of a people (Agamben 1998: 27). For Agamben, it seems, the
origin and the essence of the law are synonymous, whereas the authors he relies on thought rather that
the two were fundamentally different.

Natural (divine, even) rights don’t link

Deranty, professor of French and German Philosophy at Macquarie University, 2004
(Jean-Philippe, “Agamben’s challenge to normative theories of modern rights,” borderlands e-journal
3(1))
12. In order to argue against fundamental rights as the normative grounding of modern politics,
Agamben presents the biopolitical thesis: the actual subject of the law is not the citizen, understood as
a person vested with fundamental rights, but the human being as living creature. The actual subject of
power is bare life. 13. I want to consider this rejection of the principle of human rights from the angle of
the emergence of biopolitics at the time of the declarations of human rights. Agamben accepts the well-
established distinction between ancient natural law, natural law under absolutism, and modern natural
law (Strauss 1953). His narrative, however, runs counter to the usual one: It is almost as if, starting
from a certain point, every decisive political event were double-sided: the spaces, the liberties, and the
rights won by individuals in their conflicts with central powers always simultaneously prepared a tacit
but increasing inscription of individuals’ lives with the state order, thus offering a new and more
dreadful foundation for the very sovereign power from which they wanted to liberate themselves
(Agamben 1998: 121). 14. This is a kind of dialectic of Enlightenment: the more individuals liberate
themselves legally from the shackles of authority, the more they subject themselves to power
biopolitically. This dialectic enables Agamben to postulate a continuous line running from the first
formulation of the Habeas Corpus, through the Bill of Rights, to the 1933 Nuremberg eugenic laws:
along this line we find the body of the individual directly exposed to the state of exception. In the
different Declarations of Human Rights that signal the historical birth of modernity, the subject becomes
citizen that is bearer of sovereignty, solely on account of his birth, his natio, or nationality. Behind the
citizen, man as bare life is hidden. This bare life exposed to sovereign power is precisely the pure
substance that the Nazi regime attempted to produce, which justifies the perception of continuity
between modern democracy and the totalitarian State. 15. This reading of the French Revolution and of
the Declarations of Human Rights used as preambles to the different constitutions of the République is
problematic. First of all, in the American Revolution, which in many senses was the model for the
French, it would be difficult to find the figure of homo sacer. The American declaration of
independence, influenced by Locke’s theory of natural law, places the origin of the rights of men in
divine laws. Political power does not apply to individuals considered from the point of view of their
birth, their natio or nationality, but to individuals fully endowed with natural rights, as creatures of
God (Kervégan 1995: 660).
Alternative Responses
 No Solvency
Foucault can offer no normative, prescriptive claim for how to resist biopower
Sinnerbrink, professor of philosophy at Macquarie University, 2005 [Robert, “Critique
Hope, Power: Challenges of Contemporary Critical Theory,” Critical Horizons 6(1)]

Drawing on Axel Honneth’s criticism, one could also argue that Foucault’s concept of biopower
presents the ‘systemic’ operation of power in respect of population regulation, but that it fails to
provide any real account of the action-theoretic perspective of individual or collective agents capable
of resisting biopower regimes.45 Here one must ask what is the specific injury, harm, or injustice
suffered by subjects subjected to regulatory biopower? We need an account of why the efficient
management of the socio-biological life of human beings might also deform, dissolve or destroy our
possibilities for corporeal agency, or cultural and social self-definition. Lacking such an account we are
left with only an intuitive, under-theorised sense of what strategies of resistance might be necessary
or justifiable in response to contemporary biopower regimes. And this remains a desideratum of any
critical theory of society that claims to be more than a neutral description of the power mechanisms
within neo-liberal biopower regimes.

Resistance against biopower like the alternative is inevitably particular and localized –
this type of resistance is useless against biopolitics
Sinnerbrink, professor of philosophy at Macquarie University, 2005 [Robert, “Critique
Hope, Power: Challenges of Contemporary Critical Theory,” Critical Horizons 6(1)]

One possibility might be to take Foucault’s enigmatic remarks about another economy of “bodies and
pleasures” as gesturing towards sexual sub-cultural practices resistant to prevailing forms of
biopower.43 But this would be to burden a very specific form of sub-cultural practice with a
hopelessly enormous task (resisting the bio-socio-economic management of the population). As
Agamben observes, even the ‘body’ and ‘pleasure’ can be regarded as functional elements of systems of
biopower rather than sites of a utopian, or rather heterotopian, resistance.44 Another possibility might
be to take various movements concerned with, for example, euthanasia, abortion, AIDS activism,
animal rights, radical environmentalism, the anti-GM lobby, and so forth, as disparate examples of the
multifarious forms of social and cultural resistance to contemporary biopower. For all their
significance, however, it is very difficult, to see how such disparate interest groups could form a
coherent form of resistant politics apart from the most fleeting ‘coalitions’ loosely bound by mutual
self-interest.

They only challenge one manifestation of the biopolitical state – this strategy is
doomed from the outset and does nothing to affect the vast majority of biopolitical
regulations
Sinnerbrink, professor of philosophy at Macquarie University, 2005 [Robert, “Critique
Hope, Power: Challenges of Contemporary Critical Theory,” Critical Horizons 6(1)]

Indeed, in keeping with the paradigm of political liberalism, the struggles between such competing
interest groups can certainly challenge particular aspects of the socio-bio-management of the
population; but they do not challenge the fundamental basis of the prevailing socio-economic order.
They do not raise particularist claims to the level of the ‘impossible’ demand for universal equality
and political justice made by those suffering injustice within exclusionary regimes. In this sense,
Foucault’s conflation of biopower with biopolitics accurately reflects the collapse of the properly
political sense of biopolitics into a (liberalist) governmentality oriented towards sociobio-
management of the population.
 Concrete Policy Analysis Key
The term Biopolitical is used as a scare word to hide from problems instead of to
confront them
Virno, interviewed by Nate Holden, Italian philosopher, semiologist, 2002 (Paolo, “General Intellect
Exodus Multitude,” Archipélago number 54, June 2002, http://www.generation-
online.org/p/fpvirno2.htm, 7-12-18, GDI-CL)

Agamben is a problem. Agamben is a thinker of great value but also, in my opinion, a thinker with no
political vocation. Then, when Agamben speaks of the biopolitical he has the tendency to transform it
into an ontological category with value already since the archaic Roman right. And, in this, in my
opinion, he is very wrong-headed. The problem is, I believe, that the biopolitical is only an effect
derived from the concept of labor-power. When there is a commodity that is called labor-power it is
already implicitly government over life. Agamben says, on the other hand, that labor-power is only
one of the aspects of the biopolitical; I say the contrary: over all because labor power is a paradoxical
commodity, because it is not a real commodity like a book or a bottle of water, but rather is simply
the potential to produce. As soon as this potential is transformed into a commodity, then, it is
necessary to govern the living body that maintains this potential, that contains this potential. Toni
(Negri) and Michael (Hardt), on the other hand, use biopolitics in a historically determined sense, basing
it on Foucault, but Foucault spoke in few pages of the biopolitical - in relation to the birth of liberalism
- that Foucault is not a sufficient base for founding a discourse over the biopolitical and my
apprehension, my fear, is that the biopolitical can be transformed into a word that hides, covers
problems instead of being an instrument for confronting them. A fetish word, an "open doors" word,
a word with an exclamation point, a word that carries the risk of blocking critical thought instead of
helping it. Then, my fear is of fetish words in politics because it seems like the cries of a child that is
afraid of the dark..., the child that says "mama, mama!", "biopolitics, biopolitics!". I don't negate that
there can be a serious content in the term, however I see that the use of the term biopolitics
sometimes is a consolatory use, like the cry of a child, when what serves us are, in all cases,
instruments of work and not propaganda words.

Broad claims of bare life conflating all migrants with refugees ignores nuanced
relationships between specific groups and the law
Whitley, Doctoral Student, 2015 (Leila Marie, “More than a Line: Borders as Embodied Sites,”
Goldsmiths, University of London, N.D.,
https://research.gold.ac.uk/12314/1/CUL_thesis_WhitleyL_2015.pdf, Accessed 7/9/18 GDI-GN)

What is clear is that some confusion

exists that equates clandestine journey with illegalized status with
refugee claims. While there may be some overlap between those who are irregular migrants and those who are
refugees, the terms are not synonymous. Not all migrants without status make asylum or refugee
claims, and not all who make asylum or refugee claims have irregular status. In fact, to conflate the
two runs together illegality and asylum seeker status , in that to be irregular is treated as synonymous
with being refugee. This is surely not the intention of the authors. Nevertheless, it should be kept in mind that there is
no such thing as an “illegal asylum seeker ,” (Hayter, 2000) and therefore no such thing as an irregular one
either. This confusion is particularly important in the context of the paper because the status of the irregular
migrant is described as bare life because of the relationship of the migrant to law, and yet these
groups of migrants have different formal relationships to law.
 Liberal Democracy Checks
Sovereignty doesn’t matter internal sovereignty checks political dependence is key
Cohen, Professor of Political Thought at Columbia University, 2006, (“Jean, Sovereign Equality Vs.
Imperial Right: The Battle over the “New World Order”, 2006, International Journal of Critical and
Democratic Theory, vol. 12 no.4, 7-12-18, GDI-Cl’)

This idea is important and would be unobjectionable were it not wed to two further claims which have
rather disturbing institutional and political implications, disclaimers notwithstanding. The first is the
insistence not only that all individuals have intrinsic worth, but that only individuals have such worth.
In order to establish that people have moral obligations beyond state borders cosmopolitan liberals
seem to think it necessary to deny that there is independent value to political community, or that it
can be a source of sui generis obligations and loyalties owed exclusively to compatriots.8 They reason
from the perspective of the individual construed as a rights-bearing moral person, not as a member of
a political community who is involved in a special political relationship or engaged in a common
political project – self-government under law – with compatriots. Political communities, solidarities,
and loyalties are deemed historically contingent mere (and mutable) facts.9 Accordingly, there is no
normative significance to state sovereignty: there is nothing inviolable or even morally special about
political and legal relationships among citizens and their polity, about domestic principles of
legitimacythat internal sovereignty articulates and external sovereignty (independence from the
jurisdiction of other states although not from international law) protects. Indeed, state boundaries
have a merely derivative significance.10 Those who accord moral significance to the political
autonomy of states (polities) are accused of “statism,” and of falling for the “domestic analogy,”
which misleadingly compares communal to individual autonomy, the equality of states to the equality
of individuals.11 But states are not persons, and only the latter can be respected as autonomous
sources of ends with a moral claim to autonomy. Accordingly, state autonomy (sovereignty) is neither
fundamental, nor adequate as a justification of the derivative principles of nonintervention and self-
determination. Claims to political autonomy, sovereignty, non- intervention, and self-determination
are contingent. Contingent on what? The second fateful move of cosmopolitan liberalism is to turn
respect for the “fundamental” human rights of persons into the sole criterion for assessing the
legitimacy for states and supranational institutions.12 In short, recognition of a state’s “sovereignty”
should turn on the degree to which it respects persons in its care rather than on its efficacy in
maintaining control. Moreover, cosmopolitan liberals purport to infer a determinant and allegedly
non-controversial list of basic human interests from the moral principle of equal respect for the
dignity of persons and insist that contemporary human rights law demonstrates that there is a global
consensus on these interests and on the obligation to protect them. The philosopher’s interpretation
of what specific basic rights the moral principle of justice to persons entails thus trumps the
constitutional specification of the content of rights through the public law and domestic political
processes within states. As Allen Buchanan puts it, “We believe persons as such have certain basic
rights because of the exceptional moral importance of certain fundamental interests all persons have.
We have been able to identify these fundamental interests because we have a clear enough idea of
what the requirements for a decent life are.”13 He comes up with his own far from minimal list by
cherry picking from human rights documents.14 Thus, in a rather un-Kantian move, these self-dubbed
“neo-Kantian” cosmopolitans seem to think that moral reflection can yield not only an abstract
principle like equal liberty, but also the specification of the content of a list of basic rights which can
serve as the criterion of legitimacy for legal and political systems. It is this move that is objectionable
for it loses sight of the indispensable role of the domestic politics and legal systems in the constitution
of freedom and the concretization of rights, and it makes the mistake of reducing the legal and the
political to the moral, a fateful error that Kant did his utmost to void.15 Respect for persons thus
seems to deny respect for their political agency in the primary context where it is possible: domestic
society!
 Erases Migrant Agency
Agamben’s critique removes migrant agency by casting them in the either/or of
political or bare life
Lee 2010 [Charles, “Bare Life, Interstices, and the Third Spaces of Citizenship,” Women’s Studies
Quarterly, 38.1/2]

Agamben’s “camp” thus provides a compelling framework for migration studies that generally results in
two conclusions: (1) unauthorized migrants, as subjects who are neither citizens nor strangers, are
deliberately left in an exceptional state of irregularity in order to be constituted as a productive part of
neoliberal normalcy; and (2) irregular migrants are reduced to the state of homo sacer, a nakedness of
sheer life without official status to demand juridical protections of citizenship or human rights. Yet
despite the powerful parallel between the camp and undocumented migra62 Bare Life, Interstices, and
the Third Space of Citizenship tion, it is notable that what begins for Agamben (and his migration studies
followers) as an open-ended space of interstitiality posited in sovereignty (i.e., camp, border, detention
center)—a zone between life and death, inside and outside, citizenship and illegality—in the end slides
into an immobile closure when it comes to the undocumented, who are forced to scramble between a
rigid binary between political life (legality, rights, citizenship) and bare life (illegality, no rights,
nonparticipation). Such bipolar mapping invites questioning, as one wonders whether it validly accounts
for the complex and intricate power relations in refugee and immigrant struggles in various locations.
Even if the borderland of unauthorized migration embodies a juridical nonspace that one “cannot
celebrate” (Coutin 2003, 172), do there not exist episodes in which undocumented subjects refuse the
status of bare life and take on moments of being political in countering the abjection of camp?
 Whatever-Being Bad
Their alternative seeks to abolish the realm of the political through the institution of
an ontological pure community of “whatever singularities” – this cannot be achieved
without a devastating form of violence equal to that of sovereignty itself.
Rasch, professor Germanic studies at the University of Indiana, 2004 [William, Sovereignty
and Its Discontents, pp. 2-4]

Now, if the triumph of a particular species of liberal pluralism denotes the de-politicization of society,
one would think that theoretical opposition to this trend would seek to rehabilitate the political. But
rather than asserting the value of the political as an essential structure of social life, the post-Marxist
left seems intent on hammering the final nails into the coffin. In the most celebrated works of recent
years, Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer (1998) and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire (2000), the
political (denoted by the notion of sovereignty) is irretrievably identified with nihilism and marked for
extinction. In both instances, the political is the cause of the loss of ‘natural innocence’ (Agamben, 1998,
p 28), that flowering of human productivity that the Western metaphysical tradition has suppressed;
and the logical paradox of sovereignty is to be overcome by the instantiation of a new ontology. In this
way, violence, which is not thought of as part of the state of nature but is introduced into the human
condition by flawed or morally perverse social institutions, is to be averted. That is, the faulty
supposition of ineluctable violence that guides political theory from Hobbes to Weber is to be replaced
by a Heideggerian, Deleuzean, Spinozan or Christian ontology of original harmony. In the words of John
Milbank, a Christian social theorist who currently enjoys a modest following among political thinkers on
the Left, there is no ‘original violence’, but rather an originary ‘harmonic peace’ which is the ‘sociality of
harmonious difference’. Thus violence ‘is always a secondary willed intrusion upon this possible infinite
order’ (Milbank, 1990, p 5). This, then, is the great supposition that links the ascetic pessimism of an
Adorno with the cheery Christian optimism of Milbank: the world as it is is as it is because of the moral
perversity of (some) human agents who willfully construct flawed social institutions. To seek to remedy
the perversity of the world as it is from within the flawed social and political structures as they are
only increases the perversity of the world. One must, therefore, totally disengage from the world as it
is before one can become truly engaged. Only a thorough, cataclysmic cleansing of the world will allow
our activities to be both ‘innocent’ and ‘productive’. Clear, though only partially acknowledged, is the
fact that this cleansing, which aims at ridding the world of intrusive violence, is itself an act of fierce
and ultimate violence —ultimate in its purported finality, but also, certainly, in its extreme ferocity.
What remains equally clear, though not acknowledged, is that whoever has the power to determine the
nature of this harmonious sociality is the one who can determine which acts of violence are to be
judged as intrusions into the placid domain and which acts of violence are to be condoned as the
necessary means of re-establishing the promise of perpetual peace. Determining the nature of this
desired, nay, required originary peace is itself a sovereign act, not the abolition of such sovereignty.
What our ultimate sovereign of harmonious peace will do with the willfully violent intruders can only
be guessed, but it is certain that they will not be looked upon as legitimate political dissenters, and
the unconditional violence that will be used to eliminate their presence will be justified by invoking
the ‘harmonic peace’ or ‘natural innocence’ they have so deliberately and maliciously disturbed. In
opposition to the near universal pressure to abolish the pesky complexity of the political, the aim of this
volume is to reject every resurrection of eschatological desire, and to affirm conflict as the necessary
and salutary basis of political life. To this end, the work of Carl Schmitt can be of considerable help. One
must be clear, however, that the term most often associated with his thought — namely political
theology — is not a term that can be sensibly used to describe his own best work. When, in 1922,
Schmitt writes that ‘all significant concepts of the modem theory of the state are secularized theological
concepts’ (Schmitt, 1985b, p 36), he makes an analogous claim about the modem political state to the
one Max Weber had already made nearly two decades earlier about the modem money economy.2 Just
as wealth, industriously achieved, serves as a sign of grace for the Puritans in early modem Europe (and
the Massachusetts Bay Colony), so too the sovereign, as a mortal God, mimics divinity. But God and
grace soon become mere power and market value, and Schmitt’s and Weber’s emphases center on the
necessities of this secularization, on the profane, not the sacred, on the political and the economic, not
the theological. Their focus is on the butterfly, so to speak, not the caterpillar. Schmitt and Weber, each
in their own way, may have recoiled from the effects of neutralization and rationalization, even
preached the occasional Jeremiad against the vacuous sterility of the modem wasteland, but, as both
recognized and clearly stated, by at least the end of the eighteenth century neither the monopolization
of power nor the accumulation of wealth were thought to guarantee salvation, or even hint at special
dispensation when it came to God’s favors. If capitalism was born from the spirit of Protestantism, it
was, for all that, capitalist, not Calvinist. And if the concepts of the modem theory of the state still
carried the traces of their ethereal origin, they were nonetheless political concepts, and these traces had
been thoroughly profaned. In short, the political for Schmitt was no more theological than money was
for Weber. And it made absolutely no sense to be nostalgic for an imagined other space or fulfilled time
in which the sacred and the profane were united. Indeed, it was for the autonomy of the political against
the prevailing political theologies, the religions of humanity called socialism and liberalism, that Schmitt
waged his conceptual warfare. Thus, if one wants to insist on referring to Schmitt as a political
theologian, it is because he made a religion out of the political — out of the distinction, that is, between
the theological and the political — and not because he sought either the spirit or the authority of the
divine in the power and violence that is the mundane world of politics. It behooves us, therefore, to
examine, briefly, the nature of this autonomy before we move on to the more detailed examinations of
the structure of the political in the chapters that follow.

A community of whatever singularity that makes contemporary forms of sovereign

control worse.
Rasch, professor Germanic studies at the University of Indiana, 2004 [William, Sovereignty
and Its Discontents, pp. 17-18]

It is true, of course, that within the leftist tradition, especially as represented by the eschatological
strains of Marxism, the political has often been thought of in ways similar to Milbank’s, as, that is, the
vehicle by means of which social reality can be so altered as to match utopian expectation; and perhaps
this nostalgia for infinite perfectibility accounts for the appeal of the ontological hope offered there and
elsewhere in recent political philosophy. When viewed as a path to secularized salvation, the political
must at least implicitly be thought of as a self-consuming artifact. Once imperfect reality and perfect
expectation are ‘reconciled’, the purpose of this manner of imagining the political has been fulfilled and
can cease to exist. On this more traditionally accepted view, then, even if the process of reconciliation
is considered to be infinite and never to be completed, the political must be seen as a constitutively
non-essential and negative feature of social life, a feature that reflects undesired imperfection. Thus, at
the imagined fulfillment of reconciliation, politics, along with the other sins of the world, simply
vanishes. In a world that sees perfection as its goal, the end of politics is the end of politics. Given the
experiences of the 20th century — both the totalitarian abolition of the political and the more recent
liberal legalization and moralization of politics — the non-Heideggerian and non-Deleuzian Left ought to
be more than a little leery of the eschatological promise of a ‘completely new politics’ (Agamben,
1998, p 11). Dreams of a truer, more authentic ontology, of a more natural expression of human desire,
a more spontaneous efflorescence of human productivity and re-productivity, feed rather than oppose
the contemporary compulsive lurch toward universal pacification and total management of global
economic and political life. Rather than dream those dreams, we should return to more sober insights
about the ineluctability of conflict that not only calls the political into being but also structures it as a
contingent, resilient, and necessary form of perpetual disagreement (Ranciere, 1999). To claim the
primacy of ‘guilt’ over ‘innocence’ or disharmony over harmony does not imply a glorification of
violence for its own sake. It merely registers a pragmatic insight, namely, that assuming
incommensurable conflict as an ineradicable feature of social life leads to more benign human
institutions than the impossible attempt to instantiate the shimmering City of God on the rocky hills
and sodden valleys that form the environment of the various cities of men and women on this very real
and insurmountable terrestrial plain. The political does not exist to usher in the good life by
eliminating social antagonism; rather, it exists to serve as the medium for an acceptably limited and
therefore productive conflict in the inevitable absence of any final, universally accepted vision of the
good life. The political, therefore, can only be defined by a structure that allows for the perpetual
production as well as contingent resolution of dissent and opposition. If conflict is its vocation, then
maintaining the possibility of conflict and thus the possibility of opposition ought to be our vocation,
especially in an age when the managers of our lives carry out their actions in the name of democracy,
while the majority of their weary subjects no longer even register what those actions are.
 Agamben Indict – Specific/Concrete Analysis Key
Agamben’s theory incomplete – only identifying the effects of illegality on migrants
fails to address the process or enforcement of illegalization
Whitley, Doctoral Student, 2015 (Leila Marie, “More than a Line: Borders as Embodied Sites,”
Goldsmiths, University of London, N.D.,
https://research.gold.ac.uk/12314/1/CUL_thesis_WhitleyL_2015.pdf, Accessed 7/9/18 GDI-GN)

These applications of Agamben’s theory as a means to think through the conditions faced by
undocumented migrants and denied asylum seekers are all studies of the effects of legal exclusion from the
nation-state. They are studies not of why a certain person, or group of persons, are illegalized, but
instead studies of the effects of this illegalization . This type of application is faithful to Agamben’s work,
which defines the homo sacer in terms of an act of sovereign dispossession . However, by limiting the
analysis to the effects of illegalization, the work does not ask the question of how or why people are
dispossessed. It also potentially situates illegality as the source or cause of the experiences that result
– struggles for material survival, exposure to discrimination and to the threat of indefinite detention
and violence. But is illegality in fact the cause of these experiences, or is it instead a mechanism that
enables exposure to violence? Conceptualizing dispossession only in terms of the legal relationship that
selectively imposes a ban against some leaves uninvestigated the way that deployments of law can be
and nearly always are mobilized to serve other ends. What does illegalization not only achieve, but target?
Why are some made illegal? And why is the illegality of some enforced and patrolled (through deportation, for
example) and/or used as a justification to fail to intervene (i.e. leaving failed refugee applicants to struggle at the level of material survival),
while the illegalized behavior of others is tolerated? Is
it in fact illegalization that structures experiences of violence,
dispossession and deportation, or is illegalization instead one of the ways these experiences are
justified by the states that enact and tolerate these mistreatments?
 Vaughn-Williams Indict
Not Baudrillian enough
Lalonde, Professor in the Department of Sociology and Legal Studies 2017 [Patrick,
“Cyborg Work: Borders as Simulation,” The British Journal of Criminology azx070,
https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azx070] GDI-CL

While early social interactionists like Erving Goffman posited that social interaction and indeed social life
unfolds within ‘theatres’ as if one is examining actors on a stage, Baudrillard (1981) argues instead that
the theatre has been displaced by what he calls ‘the satellization of the real’ (Baudrillard 1981: 149).
Whereas theatre is employed to feign or dissimilate reality, simulation instead serves to employ logics
of control alongside abandoning distinctions between ‘real’ and ‘fake’ in ‘an operation [designed] to
deter every real process by its operational double, a metastable, programmatic, perfect descriptive
machine which provides all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes’ (Baudrillard 1981:
4). The real never has to be feigned again given that simulation is opposed to representation, employing
the ‘sign’ not as an equivalent but rather as the negation or replacement of every reference (Baudrillard
1981: 11). The sign does not simply stand in for the ‘real’; rather, it removes the real and becomes
indistinguishable from it. Simulations in the realm of security unfold as a planned model of infallibility
characteristic of maximal security and deterrence (Baudrillard 1981: 65). The object of the game of
security is the simulation of certain risks, threats and events becoming real (prevention), adapting to
their hypothetical inevitability (resilience) and ultimately pre-empting them from becoming real.
According to Bogard (1996), surveillance has also entered the realm of simulation, with technologies
like computer profiling serving to simulate surveillance ‘in the sense that they precede and redouble a
means of observation’ and produce “surveillance in advance of surveillance, a technology of
‘observation before the fact’” (p. 27). And ultimately, simulations come to govern ‘the social’ in its
entirety: ‘This is the true nuclear fallout: the meticulous operation of technology serves as a model for
the meticulous operation of the social. Here, too, nothing will be left to chance’ (Baudrillard 1981:
63).The simulation of security in relation to borders is explored by de Lint (2008). He concludes that a
sovereign may employ simulation to generate ‘monsters’ that do not exist in reality (de Lint 2008:
177). In terms of borders specifically, de Lint employs a Foucauldian perspective in concluding that the
border is a site of performance whereby the sovereign (vis-à-vis petty sovereigns) can stage political
violence alongside the frugality associated with liberalism in producing logics of exclusion (de Lint
2008: 180). The border is a stage serving to ‘cut down abject others or to manipulate
subjects/individuals/cohorts with shocking discretionary displays’ (de Lint 2008: 180). However, de
Lint conceptualizes simulation (and thus also borders) within the context of the theatre of early social
interactionism, as a way of ‘acting out’ and producing metastable border logics elsewhere (de Lint 2008:
181). He neglects to consider that simulation does not simply work to produce a stage to screen the
performance of the sovereign for all to see, but rather simulation (as Baudrillard would contend)
serves to remove the stage completely and replace it with something else entirely, namely an
abstraction. Simulation is also employed by Vaughan-Williams (2010) in examining the virtuality of the
sovereign ban characteristic of the biopolitics of border security. As the sovereign shifts from governing
via discipline to instead ‘regularizing’ life through biopower, security begins to function not by
arresting movement but rather by permitting circulation and flow (Vaughan-Williams 2010: 1078).
Accordingly, border policies have shifted from an ‘old border’ mentality characterized exclusively by
governing mobility at physical borders to a ‘biopolitical apparatus of security in its mobility and
enhancement of liberal subjects’ movement’ (Vaughan-Williams 2010: 1078). Borders become
characterized within the context of a continuum, spreading to a variety of sites away from traditional
physical borders in attempting to govern mobility. Border security is therefore explained within the
context of Baudrillard’s (1981) simulation, with neoliberal subjects made virtual (and thus manageable)
through technologies of pre-emption, including, for instance, ‘algorithmic models of risk management
based on the profiling of populations’ (Vaughan-Williams 2010: 1080).Vaughan-Williams’ discussion of
simulation is limited to the extent it does not provide a concrete explanation of how simulation has
served to replace the ‘reality’ of border security with signs. His metaphor hinges on several taken-for-
granted conclusions that require closer examination. For instance, Vaughan-Williams never makes clear
how the virtuality of identity is used by border agents within the continuum to produce the sovereign
ban (other than vague conclusions that pre-emption and risk are somehow involved). Vaughan-
Williams (2010: 1077) also employs Walters’s (2006a) flawed conception of the firewall as a metaphor
for how border security continua function. Lastly, Vaughan-Williams seems to default to a panoptic
understanding of the simulation of borders despite his reliance on biopolitics to frame his argument.
He does not consider how simulated borders function within post-panoptic societies of control.
Neg to the Aff
Capitalism
 Link
Class struggle is expressed through geographic knowledge. Geography is a means of
capitalism
Riou, contributor to Hérodote, 2007 (Michel, Chapter 6, Space, Knowledge and Power: Foucault
and Geography, eds. Stuart Elden, Professor of Political Theory and Geography and Jeremy Crampton,
Ph.D The Pennsylvania State University, 2007, pg.s 35, EBSCO, Accessed 7/6/18 GDI-JV)

Michel Foucault’s first question, it seems to me, can be broken down in the following way: What is war? What is strategy? For me, war
is
the enduring exercise of concentrated force. War, in the contemporary era, is only one of the forms of
class struggle and capitalist competition. It is just the most spectacular and most murderous
manifestation of the antagonisms at work in class societies. Knowledge, obviously including
geographical knowledge, but also physical, chemical, mathematical and sociological knowledge, amongst others, is necessary
for war. It is not by itself the source of knowledge, however. The source of knowledge resides in permanent,
everyday, hard-fought class struggle. The majority of progress in the domain of the natural sciences
has been brought about within the framework of capitalist competition. The majority of knowledges
in the domain of the social sciences have been developed in order better to preserve the domination
of one class over another, to avoid revolts and troubles of any sort. It is not only geography that is
born of combat, it is knowledge as a whole. Through the specific form that it gives to antagonisms, war by its nature
accelerates the progress of knowledge, but it is not the only source of it. Class struggle expresses itself through
geographical knowledge, even if war has contributed and still contributes powerfully to its
constitution. This, of course, by no means signifies that war has no need of geography, whichever camp one happens to
belong to! The second part of the question deals with strategy. Being a man of politics only insofar as I am a citizen, this interests me less. It
seems very clear to me, however, that strategy
is the art of engaging in combat in favourable conditions. Besides the
military, it interests trade unionists, politicians and intellectuals. In our own domain of the combat of
ideas, it seems to me extremely important to know where, when and by whom such and such an aspect of the dominant ideology will be
attacked. I am not, for all that, speaking of war. But it seems to me undeniable that there is combat, which is to say precise objectives, and
tactics, adversaries who are defined as such, and victory and defeat. There is nonetheless a nuance of size to be respected: political struggle,
under both its pacific and military forms, has in view the destruction of an adversary, insofar as they are an adversary. Strategy
has the
goal, in this case, of ensuring a provisional domination with a view to definitive elimination. Turning to intellectual struggle, this
does not aim at the elimination of a source of ideas, the potential enriching that would constitute the
adversary. Domination, which is to say an endlessly accrued audience for its thought, is enough.
Intellectual struggle can only have strategic objectives in view. This is one of the reasons for which it cannot be
decisive, and for which it can no longer achieve completion. The leading role of the working class in the domain of art and spirituality does not
consist in imposing silence. It consists in taking its thoughts on its allies and adversaries a little further every day, starting from, and in, the
framework of its own approach. But the process is dialectical: it is only to the extent that it listens and allows speech that the proletariat is
capable of providing social reality with a sufficiently just and convincing analysis for itself to be heard and followed . Strategy is
therefore a means of intellectual domination; but above all it is important to know exactly what one means by domination.
One cannot reply to this in a non-dynamic way. Power demonstrates, reveals itself. To the profit of whoever brings about the evolution of a
society? To the profit of whoever has power. And the definition of power is just that: it is the capacity in which a person,
a class or an institution finds them- or itself able to make the whole social body evolve to their or its
own profit. It goes without saying that political power is not always real power, and that in the final analysis, and for a sufficiently long
period , power has belonged to who holds the fundamental means of production . I believe that this much can be
drawn from any slightly serious historical study. With regard to the very nature of power, it lies quite simply in armed force; all the rest is only
the premises, trappings, symbols and consequences of the possession of armed force. It seems to me that, since
Marx, the question
has been settled… Geography must be made a means of reading the global crisis of imperialism,
capitalism and centralism in all its forms. Geography is the projection of history in space. It is not about
becoming a sociologist, an ethnologist, a political scientist or similar. What defines a science is the questions that it poses. What
defines
geography, what distinguishes it from the other merchants of social science, is the spatial analysis that
it practices. At the level of the landscape, the plan and the map. Social forces manifest themselves in
space. They inscribe themselves on the landscape, the plan and the map. Space is the place where
history inscribes itself, and geography should be the analysis of that which dwells and is born there . The
cost of this would be that geographers become what they should be: awakeners of consciousness, educators
and thereby liberators. We will only arrive at this by continually drawing on practice, on the transformation
of nature and society. Without doubt, geography presupposes specialists, institutions and credits. But I am convinced that it cannot
progress in the silence of laboratories, out of permanent contact with the masses, on pain of endlessly getting stuck in old ruts.
Only a specialist can help the masses to analyse space, but only the masses live space, and know concretely what it is. Only a long-term policy
[une politique de longue durée] can put geography (and knowledge as a whole) in the service of the masses – not professions of faith by such
and such a minister or such and such a geographer.