Neoliberal Immigration Policy
Across time and varying ethnic groups, the same basic tenants have justified socioeconomic stratification, white fear-mongering and supremacy, and violence against bodies of color, reified every few generations to continually conceal and perpetuate the capital interests of the state: adherence to traditional, cisheteropatriarchal family values; personal responsibility as performed through economic self-sufficiency; the subtle positioning of one disenfranchised group against another, to the end of whitewashing and subjugating both. The nature of these systems can be most thoroughly parsed through an examination of two texts in conjunction. Eithne Luibhéid surveys in Entry Denied: A History of U.S. Immigration Control the neoliberal immigration
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Initially cast concurrently as exploitable laborers and as morally corrupt scapegoats for the social ills of the day, much like the Chinese before them and the Mexicans yet to come, immigrants from southern and eastern Europe were also remolded in the aftermath of WWII, notably as the civil rights movement took shape; the general social perception regarding people of Italian, Irish, Polish, Jewish, etc. descent shifted from one about criminality, deviance, and congenital racial inferiority to nearly the opposite as white neoliberal projects worked to suppress black power and intellect and to reformulate themselves under a new post-war sociopolitical order. Where for years white ethnics had been viewed by nativists “as racially inferior, fecund burdens on the state” (Perry, 101), they were “whitened” in the process of black subjugation (Pedraza 36-39), and the illusion of successful bootstrap-pulling was created regarding these people in such a way that suggested a demonstrably false premise of equality (Perry, 74). By manipulating the circumstances that create social stratification, including but not limited to targeted legislation and public rhetoric, neoliberal agendas once again effectively weaponized a group of people once subjugated themselves, violently erasing their ethnic and cultural underpinnings in a chilling effort to homogenize the white front against those people it considers its negations. Importantly, in ostensibly contradicting itself by allowing (even creating) such an apparently substantial paradigm shift, the system effectively refreshed its camouflage once again without updating any of its fundamental tenants, especially those of personal responsibility and adherence to family values. This allows for the ongoing reification of the process, which is constantly reconstructing
Initially cast concurrently as exploitable laborers and as morally corrupt scapegoats for the social ills of the day, much like the Chinese before them and the Mexicans yet to come, immigrants from southern and eastern Europe were also remolded in the aftermath of WWII, notably as the civil rights movement took shape; the general social perception regarding people of Italian, Irish, Polish, Jewish, etc. descent shifted from one about criminality, deviance, and congenital racial inferiority to nearly the opposite as white neoliberal projects worked to suppress black power and intellect and to reformulate themselves under a new post-war sociopolitical order. Where for years white ethnics had been viewed by nativists “as racially inferior, fecund burdens on the state” (Perry, 101), they were “whitened” in the process of black subjugation (Pedraza 36-39), and the illusion of successful bootstrap-pulling was created regarding these people in such a way that suggested a demonstrably false premise of equality (Perry, 74). By manipulating the circumstances that create social stratification, including but not limited to targeted legislation and public rhetoric, neoliberal agendas once again effectively weaponized a group of people once subjugated themselves, violently erasing their ethnic and cultural underpinnings in a chilling effort to homogenize the white front against those people it considers its negations. Importantly, in ostensibly contradicting itself by allowing (even creating) such an apparently substantial paradigm shift, the system effectively refreshed its camouflage once again without updating any of its fundamental tenants, especially those of personal responsibility and adherence to family values. This allows for the ongoing reification of the process, which is constantly reconstructing