US Immigration Law and its Geographies of Social Control: Lessons from Homosexual Exclusion during the Cold War

Abstract

Despite its preoccupation with issues of space, power, and subjectivity, as well as being a prominent home for immigration-related scholarship, geography includes little research on the intersection of immigration and sexuality as well as on their joint regulation through immigration law. This paper looks at the intersection of immigration and sexuality through the lens of the Cold War practice of homosexual exclusion in US immigration law. By drawing linkages between homosexual exclusion and current immigration law, I argue that homosexual exclusion is not an aberrant part of US immigration law history, that immigration law has important social control functions, and that, as a result, immigration researchers in geography attend to immigration control beyond border enforcement per se.