Borderline epidemics: Latino immigration and racial biopolitics

Abstract

This essay examines the role of race in the differential distribution of life, death and disposability as it pertains to Latino/a immigrants in the USA—especially immigrants of Mexican descent. I explore Michel Foucault's theories of disciplinary and biopolitical power, showing how his insights challenge attempts to figure undocumented immigrants in terms of a social contract. By reframing immigration in terms of who is subject to disciplinary surveillance and who lives and who dies, I contend that Foucault's work is not just relevant to biological racism but is also present-day variants of “cultural” or “ethical” racism. The racial, territorial and temporal borders that are produced and contested in the ongoing crises of immigration detention, abuse, exploitation and deportation traverse the conceptual borders of disciplinary power and biopower in Foucault's work. With this in mind, I examine the tensions and correspondences between disciplinary power's relation to epidemic threats, and biopower's orientation toward endemic threats. Foucault's analysis of the “plague dream” where states of emergency are normalized sheds light on how Latino/a immigrants have been treated as an epidemic threat to be arrested and/or expelled. Through an exposition of how Foucault's account of the “military dream” of society as a uniform army is conjoined to a political project that is at once disciplinary and biopolitical, we see how Latino immigrants are also regarded as a vaccinating agent useful in inoculating the polity against the endemic contingencies of life Foucault refers to as “aleatory events.” The immunity paradigm provides interpretive leverage that helps us to understand the relays between disciplinary and biopolitical power, while also illuminating the apparent contradiction in American politics whereby immigrants are alternately regarded as both a cure and a disease. In both cases, the immigrants in question are either tacitly or explicitly regarded as outside the human race.