Love in Precarious Times: A Queer Politics of Immigration

Abstract

Increased media coverage of the human costs of border enforcement, especially the detention of children and the separation of families, has called attention to structural violence and inhumanity in the US immigration system. An estimated eleven million undocumented people and millions more members of mixed-status families have lived for years with the trauma caused by legal exclusion, economic precarity, and separation from loved ones. Yet years of legislative reform efforts and rights claims based on heteronormative notions of immigrant respectability, family unity, and economic contributions have failed to yield better policies. This article describes a turn within the immigrant rights movement in the 2010s toward a more transformative politics of radical inclusion across, not in spite of, differences in sexuality, gender, race, citizenship, and immigration status. Citing examples from immigrant public testimonies, movement publications, LISTSERVs, and social media, we argue that they offer evidence of new, durable bonds of political interdependence being forged between unusual allies in the struggle against racist and homo/transphobic state violence that we describe as a queer politics. The gains of the marriage equality movement, especially shifting cultural acceptance of same-sex love, support immigrant organizing across and beyond the constraints of strategic alliances, coalitions, and hierarchies of deservingness. Practices of loving politics, particularly in the current context, offer resources for hope for a stronger and more durable political consensus about what constitutes immigrant justice in the future.