Philosophy in the Contemporary World 21:1 (Spring 2014)

_________________________________

“Illegal” Immigrants:

Law, Fantasy, and Guts

Carlos Alberto Sánchez

San Jose State University

carlos.sanchez@sjsu.edu

_________________________________

ABSTRACT: This paper examines the construction and de-construction

of the “illegal” immigrant in media spectacle and public discourse. I

examine the manner in which immigrants (specifically, Mexican

immigrants) are rendered “illegal” and then processed through a

mechanism of dehumanization where they are simultaneously located

in and outside the space of law. In this process, the “illegal” immigrant

is stripped of rights, humanity, and intention. The “illegal” immigrant,

seen merely as a body or text, becomes (in the public discourse and

media spectacle) a thing—more precisely, a type of equipment, that as

equipment, as Martin Heidegger observed, eventually (via

historical/economic contingencies) becomes “obtrusive” and thus a

target of nativist violence.

2 Carlos Alberto Sánchez

THE IMAGE IS FAMILIAR: three silhouettes painted on a yellow

background with the words CAUTION above them. The “father” figure in the lead,

the “mother” close behind pulling a little girl by the arm whose feet don’t seem to

touch the ground since they are obviously running at full speed. The original signs

were posted on certain San Diego-area freeways as a warning to drivers that there

might be immigrants crossing. Of course, nowhere do these signs say “immigrants

crossing,” but that is precisely what the signs suggest. The sign has become

simultaneously an avatar for the “immigrant problem” and a “quirky regional

souvenir” with commercial clout (Berestein, 2005).

The San Diego signs do not depict US citizens. They depict “illegal” Mexican

immigrants. They depict humans unexplainably, and irrationally, crossing a

dangerous highway without a proper right of way. We have to ask: What makes

them Mexican? And, furthermore, what makes them illegal? What makes them

“Mexican” is context—you will not see these images on Highway 280 near San

Francisco or on the New Jersey Turnpike. Of course, not all who cross the US-

Mexican border are Mexican, but the stereotype perpetuates that belief and hides the

fact those who run across might be Central Americans, Cubans, or Sri Lankan

refugees. What makes the figures “illegal,” furthermore, is much more complex, but

it involves a public discourse that defines the space of law and equates irrationality

with criminals, criminals with immigrants, and immigrants with Mexicans. The

public imagination appropriates the belief that these figures are Mexican illegal

immigrants based on a discourse itself founded on historical memory and the

perpetuation of that memory in media and novelty gift shops.

Regardless of their appropriation by a public discourse bent on characterizing

immigrants as criminals fleeing the scene of a crime, the signs are, indeed, a

fragmentary snapshot of the imagined immigrant experience.1 Here we have a

nuclear family unit composed of three distinct bodies. Each body tells a different

part of a larger story: the father, leaning slightly forward, clutches his fists and

leads; the mother, skirt above the knees, secures her daughter’s wrist with her right

hand, dragging the child off the ground in a show of strength and love. It is obvious

that they are running; what is not obvious is their destination. That the sign is posted

on the side of freeways tells us that they are running from one side of the road to the

other. But their bodies tell us something different: they are not stopping once they

get to the other side. They are running until they are safe, wherever that might be.

These are bodies in motion, fully present in their moment and intentionally, i.e.,

consciously and rationally, directed to an unknown horizon.

Again, this image is a generalization—a stereotype. But it is a stereotype that

speaks to the reality, not of the immigrant experience, but of the non-immigrant

1 I am not saying that the signs are meant as a malevolent caricature of life on the US-Mexican border; in

fact, the signs are meant to protect those crossing by alerting drivers to be cautious, and, ironically, to

care for those who might be running across. My point is one about appropriation by the anti-immigrant narrative.

“Illegal” Immigrants: Law, Fantasy, and Guts 3

experience of that experience. In the non-immigrant objectification of the

immigrant, that is, in the public imaginary, the immigrant body is taken as a source

of information and as probable evidence of the immigrant’s de facto criminality

(they run for a reason). In fact, anti-immigration legislation relies on the testimony

of the immigrant body; the behaviors of that body give the immigrant away, as well

as what the body wears, what it says when it speaks, or the color of its covering.

The body, it turns out, is a source for reasonable suspicion. Indeed, recent anti-

immigrant legislation fetishizes the immigrant body and demotes it to the space of

things.

In this paper, I want to examine the contours of this demotion in the context of

an illegalist-discourse that fuels contemporary anti-immigration sentiments in law,

media spectacle, and public imagination. Without waddling too far into the murky

moral waters that surround this topic, I want to examine the manner in which the

immigrant body is rendered “illegal” in this discourse and then processed through a

mechanism of dehumanization where it is simultaneously constructed and

deconstructed. In this mechanism, the “illegal” immigrant is constructed as a

strange otherness that aims to take what “we” have, who labors in the intentional

pursuit of replacing “American culture” with her own, degenerate, culture, and who

schemes and plots a way to terrorize us all. Through a simultaneous process of

deconstruction, however, this “illegal” is stripped of rights, humanity, and intention.

The “illegal” immigrant is a thing, or a piece of equipment, that as equipment, as

Martin Heidegger observed, eventually becomes “obtrusive” and must be removed.

I divide my comments into 3 sections: in Section 1, I consider the place of the

“illegal” immigrant within a space of law and the space of rights. This is a space of

exclusion, outside of which we find “things” in the space of the non-human. In the

space outside the space of rights, the “illegal” immigrant body is objectified and can

thus be treated as disposable equipment. Martin Heidegger’s phenomenological

observations regarding the being of the “ready-to-hand” play a key role in this

discussion. In Section 2, I sketch what I call the “mechanism of dehumanization.”

This mechanism is fueled by, what Leo Chavez calls, “the Latino Threat Narrative,”

involving media spectacle and the illegalist-discourse of the public sphere. In the

final section, Section 3, I reflect on the “illegal” immigrant body as text and source

of information, concluding that whether perceived as equipment or text (and as such

an object of surveillance and interrogation) race is the data that defines this body.

1. Law and Objectification

Citizens exist within the space of law. To be a citizen means that, as Hannah

Arendt, as well as US Superior Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, declared, one has

“the right to have rights” [(Ngai, 10) (Benhabib, 50-51)]. In this way, citizenship is

defined by the boundaries of the space of law. Inside the space of law are those who

have the right to have rights, including the right to exist. The space of law is thus

the space of rights. Outside the space of law/rights is the space of no-law,

criminality, or “illegality.” This is the space occupied by entities without a world, or

without a role or place in the space of law; it is the space occupied by things,

objects, events, and actions deemed incompatible, disruptive, or destructive to the

4 Carlos Alberto Sánchez

legal order, e.g., things like cocaine, events like dog fighting, acts like extortion,

rape or murder. Interestingly, we call those persons who engage in cocaine

trafficking, dog fighting, rape or extortion, criminals. They are placed in jail or

prison and an attempted “correction” ensues. Never do we call a cocaine trafficker

or a rapist an “illegal,” as this term is reserved for those objects or processes that

have no place in our ordered civilized world. However, when the crime is the

trespassing of a national boundary, the trespasser is deemed an illegal, and

immediately cast into that space of exclusion reserved for the act of pedophilia or

genocide. To be deemed an “illegal” is, therefore, not simply to be deemed a

criminal, as criminals can still take part, and sometimes the most visible part at that,

in the space of rights (they can be advocates for the victims they once victimized,

etc.). But to be deemed an “illegal” is to be cast out of the space of law and placed

in that vulnerable space where rights, including the right to breathe, think, or speak,

do not exist.2

The public imagination is well versed on “who” stands outside the space of law,

rights, and the human. Outside the bounded space of the San Diego signs, “illegals”

are easier to capture in perception. They are amongst us, and we known them when

we see them. They stand in front of home improvement warehouses; they populate

vegetable fields and fruit orchards; they build houses; they live in groups; travel in

groups; commit crimes; die violent deaths; steal jobs. The public knows their

language and the color of their skin. It cannot be any other way: we know who they

are because we “know” what they look like, or what they should look like, because

“illegality” is “written upon” their bodies (Chavez, 25). The public discourse about

immigrants, or the illegality-discourse, both writes and reads “illegality” onto and

off of the bodies of immigrants. It does this through stereotypes based on race. As

Michael Dummett puts it, immigrants will “always [be] understood as ‘coloured

immigrants” (2001, xi). But these stereotypes are also manufactured by the

exclusionary force of law. As Sarat et. al., have put it: “[aliens] are made through

law, rather than born through accidents of geography” (2010, 2).

Most of the time, however, the “illegal” immigrant body is not seen at all.

Outside the realm of the visible, the illegal immigrant body represents human

capital, an affordable labor force, or an expandable commodity, all of which are

indispensible for the proper workings of the capitalist economy. But this

indispensability is left unsaid or underappreciated, and as such, remains outside the

realm of a discourse that would make it manifest. However, the indispensability of

the “illegal” immigrant body is suggested in certain contradictory views that

highlight the simultaneous objectification and dehumanization of “illegal”

immigrants in our social space. That is, certain legislative moves both thingify and

push the undocumented immigrant outside the space of the human.

The most blatant example is proposed Texas House Bill 1202 which would

make hiring illegal immigrants a crime punishable by fines and jail-time except

when that illegal immigrant is hired to do household work (Riddle, 2011; Dykes,

2 The UN Declaration of Human Rights of Non-Citizens does not cover “illegals.” So the “illegal” exists

not only outside a space of law that protects citizens of a nation, but also outside the space of law that protects citizens of the planet (see Lillich, 51).

“Illegal” Immigrants: Law, Fantasy, and Guts 5

2011).3 The bill failed to pass. However, what is significant is the fact that it was

written and presented as possible legislation and social policy. Bills such as these

are representations of the illegality-discourse and its consequences. In particular,

this bill affirms the need for the use of “illegal” immigrants in the household

economy while, simultaneously, denying illegal immigrants the opportunity

afforded to all members of society. This suggests that the illegal immigrant must

assume a certain role in that social economy, namely, the role of equipment

necessary for the maintenance of a lifestyle. The body of the illegal immigrant is

objectified so as to complement other household appliances; it becomes an

extension of the vacuum cleaner, the lawn mower, or the hoe.

When describing the ontological difference between beings capable of

questioning their own being, namely, human beings or Dasein, and beings incapable

of questioning their own being, Martin Heidegger proposed that the latter are

essentially dispensable. Those entities with which Dasein deals with in its

“everydayness” in order to do one thing or another, Heidegger’s Being and Time

refers to as “equipment ready-to-hand” (1962, 102). Equipment is what we use to

get things done; equipment is handy and economical. But equipment is equipment

only because it stands within a context of significance that makes it equipment

(Heidegger, 97). This context can be other equipment, tasks, or the economic

structures that give import to some tools and tasks over others. Within this context,

the equipment that we are used to may become an obstacle, instead of a handy aid,

to our goals. Our equipment can break down or become useless when it gets in our

way or when it is wrong for the occasion. A saw loses its teeth, becoming an

obstacle in our woodworking project or a safety hazard when thrown on the shop

floor. In such cases, equipment becomes burdensome. Heidegger writes: “When its

unusability is thus discovered, equipment becomes conspicuous. This

conspicuousness presents the ready-to-hand equipment as in a certain un-readiness-

to-hand” (1962, 102-103). In other words, when the equipment does not meet our

needs, it suddenly shows up everywhere; we see it every time we are set to engage

in our tasks. It will frustrate us, as it is there, unable to help us with our project.

Along with its conspicuousness, equipment may also become obtrusive and

obstinate when it fails to meet our demands.

Considered as equipment, the “illegal” immigrant will meet the immediate needs

of a flourishing economy. Society will be welcoming, or the very least, tolerant of

the “illegals” in our midst. However, if the social conditions change, e.g.,

recessions, depressions, or other ills that might plague society, the “illegal”

immigrant loses her perceived function. When there is an abundance of employment

opportunities, the “illegal” immigrant serves to fill them; she does this invisibly and

“behind the scenes.” If there are not enough jobs, the “illegal” immigrant becomes

unusable—and, hence, conspicuous, obtrusive, and obstinate. Anti-immigrant

legislation, treating the “illegal” immigrant body as equipment, is thus meant to

dispose of what was once useful to us in our everyday, and long-term, projects.

3 The bill, proposed by Texas State Representative Debbie Riddle, a Republican, would make the hiring

of an undocumented worker for any other purpose punishable by up to 2 years in prison an a $10,000 fine. The bill failed to make it to committee.

6 Carlos Alberto Sánchez

The bill cited above, which explicitly “thingifies” the “illegal” immigrant,

simultaneously values and devalues the very being of persons. It devalues a person

by turning her into a tool; it values her by emphasizing her irreplaceable importance

in the American economy, one in which her absence would be immediately felt.

Heidegger points to this phenomenon: “when something ready-to-hand is found

missing, though its everyday presence has been so obvious that we have never taken

any notice of it, this makes a break in those referential contexts which

circumspection discovers. Our circumspection comes up against emptiness, and

now sees for the first time what the missing article was ready-to-hand with, and

what it was ready-to-hand for” (Heidegger, 105). The thought of preserving a

certain comfort motivates the Texas attempt to simultaneously deny the humanity of

the “illegal” immigrant and affirm the usefulness of their bodies in the economy of

everyday life.

But bodies are not merely material means of production. Bodies constitute the

human being and that being’s interaction with its environment. But a discourse

which aims to “allow” the “illegal” immigrant to exist insofar as its existence is

limited to the realm of things, forgets that hiding beneath the skin of this particular

thing is a mind, culture, history, and language. It is, indeed, quite surprising when

an “illegal” immigrant speaks out for her rights, or complains about being outside

the space of law and the space of recognition. The citizenry seem shocked to learn

that, yes, this “thing” has a mind after all. It makes front-page news when the

object holds political protests, organizes resistance movements, or speaks and

demands recognition.4

The “illegal” immigrant thus finds herself paradoxically outside the space of law

but inside the realm of capitalist production, as equipment. She is both in and

outside the space of life and culture while always outside the space of rights—she is

both valued and reified.

It is clear however, that while the “illegality” of the immigrant might suggest its

inhumanity, the suggestion is preposterous. Like all bodies, the immigrant body

constitutes space, time, and its world—something that shovels just cannot do. In

Heideggerean terms, the immigrant is Dasein, whether state-sanctioned (i.e.,

documented) or not. But, as incredible as Texas House Bill 2012 might seem, it

places in high relief the paradoxical manner in which the immigrant body is

objectified, the way in which this objectification reduces that body (male or female)

to the space of things and, simultaneously, places it external to the space of law and

conviviality but internal to the workings of our economy.

2. Mechanism of Dehumanization

Recent legislative trends target unauthorized Mexican and Central American

immigrants specifically. This is mostly due to the proximity of these nations to the

4 As is often the case when “illegal” immigrants participate in non-violent protests. They are aware that they will be deported, and they nonetheless ask for recognition (see Preston, 2010). This kind of behavior

surprises us: why would they risk deportation? My point is that we are surprised at such actions because,

again, we would not expect such human behavior from those deemed “inhuman” by our social and political discourse.

“Illegal” Immigrants: Law, Fantasy, and Guts 7

US southern border, and thus to the conspicuousness of these foreign nationals

along the US southwest. They are the bodies we encounter on the side of the

highway; they are our roofers, our gardeners, and our street vendors. Their

conspicuousness is partly due to a political discourse, that when amplified in the

media portrays these bodies as taking up a fillable space that could be easily filled

by citizens, who, for economic reasons, need a space to fill. The numbers feed the

fear: in some States, legal Latin American immigrants account for 55% of the total

immigrant population—or at least the population that felt comfortable enough to be

counted in such surveys (Armendariz, 2011). So the conspicuousness of the

immigrant (legal or not) becomes a problem; immigrants become obstacles in our

perpetual search for the good, comfortable, life, and as such the most visible targets

of an anti-illegalist discourse.

Michel Foucault argues that visibility is central to a disciplinary power that

means to objectify. “It is the fact of being constantly seen, of being able always to

be seen, that maintains the disciplined individual in his subjection” (Foucault, 187).

The political and social discourse that highlights the “illegal” immigrant as problem

aims, in this way, to make them visible so as to maintain them in their marginality,

i.e., in their subjection. But “illegal” immigrants are aware of this surveillance, so

they refuse to be counted. As invisible, the body of the immigrant poses no threat

and becomes unproblematic. Disciplinary power, however, demands its object to be

seen. Moreover, it requires that its object be highlighted in its visibility. Media

spectacle becomes the manner in which this highlighting must take place.

In The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord defines the spectacle as “a world-view

that has actually been materialized, a view of a world that has become objective”

(2002, 7). In other words, the spectacle is the avatar of the real, the metaphor of

what could otherwise be explained in long form, through stories or paragraph, but

which is not. The spectacle is a slice of our life radicalized and wrapped up into

images, blurbs, or talking-points meant for mass consumption.

We can see that the spectacle that re-presents the “illegal” immigrant body is not

only the result of media presentations and representations which depict this body in

one way or another, but, rather, it is a “world-view” that is taken as fact without

question. This world-view filters media representations themselves, communal

prejudices, and personal perspectives of the “illegal” immigrant body. The spectacle

of the “illegal” immigrant is internalized, and this internalization serves as an axis

upon which society can refine its ever-changing ideas of citizenship, equality, and

freedom.

But more than that: the spectacle, an object for mass consumption, pulls the

invisible out into the light of day. Media spectacle inserts itself into the public

imaginary with a pre-fabricated image meant to shock the public into seeing

something that is not there, that is, into seeing an unstoppable saturation of our

society by “illegals.” The image it reproduces in the discourse of illegality takes the

form of statistics taken from official government data; these numbers are repeated

constantly. The point of this constant repetition is to transform the image of the

“illegal” immigrant into a bloodless and boneless representation; it aims at what

Debord calls “separation” which splits “reality and image” and presents the image

as truth (2002, 8). The separation makes it possible to treat the “illegal” immigrant

8 Carlos Alberto Sánchez

as object. This is because, as Leo Chaves puts it, “[i]t is easier to lack empathy for

those objects and to pass policies and laws to govern their behavior” (2008, 6).

A political discourse and its corresponding rationality realized in law, together with

a media spectacle that authenticates that rationality as a reflection of an accepted

narrative, constitute a process of dehumanization at the end of which we encounter

the “illegal” immigrant body as disposable thing or equipment. The process is

experienced as a self-perpetuating “threat narrative" justified by racial prejudice,

recreated in spectacle, and deployed into the social sphere where an already fearful

and hesitant public adopts its grammar and vision. This mechanism, which includes

law, spectacle, and narrative perpetuates the fear of otherness and simultaneously

creates and deconstructs the “illegal” immigrant as presence and problem.

Hence, the mechanism of dehumanization simultaneously constructs and

deconstructs immigrants. This involves juridical reality, the laws which are passed

and enforced targeting immigrants, or those reasonably suspected of being such; it

involves the imaginary placing of these “illegals” outside the space of law or the

space of rights, where they do not have “the right to have rights” and are thus

considered, by the public at large, non-human artifacts of failed immigration laws;

and it involves the media spectacle that characterizes and firmly places them in our

consciousness.

3. Beyond Fantasy

If Plato is right and that which is portrayed (an image, illustration, etc.) is twice

removed from reality, then popular representations of “illegal” immigrants are

likewise alien to the real lives of immigrants. Citing Debord, Leo Chavez rightly

observes that in this spectacle, immigrants live “virtual lives…devoid of the

nuances and subtleties of real lived lives” (2008, 5-6). The lives that are imagined

for them are indeed devoid of suffering, desire, and love.

It is in this popular imaginary that the “illegal” immigrant is “seen.” They take

their place in that space of illegality where, as Foucault would say, they are

“exposed,” or unprotected, and, as a consequence, marginalized (1995, 69). This

exposure, however, is constructed by the mechanism of dehumanization discussed

above. The exposure hides more than it shows, as it is a fabricated exposure, in

other words, it is a myth.

What do we get when we look past this myth? Confronting the “illegal”

immigrant in flesh, blood, and guts is necessary to the process of deconstructing

these necessary myths—necessary because they, in turn, serve as the limit and

preconditions to any sense of citizenship to which we can appeal. There is nothing

beyond the “illegal” immigrant; citizenship is constructed in their presence and

because of them. If I am not one, I must be the other.

But what is this talk of guts? The physiogomy of the illegal immigrant is

identical to the physiogamy of the citizen—there's a spleen, and a liver, and a heart

palpitating and pumping blood, intestines that digest, and kidneys that filter. Take

away his outer covering, and the illegal immigrant is just, as Epictetus would say, “a

little soul carrying around a corpse.”

“Illegal” Immigrants: Law, Fantasy, and Guts 9

The problem is that we can't take away his outer covering. Hence, the skin of the

immigrant is the filter through which he is seen.

Driving north past the Los Angeles County line, one is bound to encounter the

presence of laboring bodies. They populate green fields wearing hats and holding

tools. While the landscape changes between Oxnard, California, and Salinas 250

miles north, the spectacle of field workers at their task retains a seemingly

consistent aesthetic: groups of bodies doing, clothed in protective clothing, wearing

gloves, sneakers, and impervious to the atmospheric conditions or the time of day.

From the safety of our cars, they seem resilient. If pressed, we would say that they

are surely Mexicans, a belief whose internal coherence implies that these bodies

belong to immigrants, and, more than likely, to illegal immigrants.

We read the bodies we encounter as we would an open book. We might look for

information in the body’s posture, its position, or its performance. We read its

posture as suggesting a certain degree of vitality. If it is upright it gives us a

different impression than if it is bent over or slouching. We read its position relative

to its environment as referring to its willingness to engage or disengage from that

environment. We read the act of its performance, of what it does, as suggesting its

own limits—suggesting what it is capable or not capable of doing. Looking for

these cues is not only true of our experience of immigrants, but of all bodies.

In the field, the field worker’s body immediately invites objectification because

of its particular posture, position, and performance. It is hunched, or bent—signs of

submissiveness or fear; it is surrounded by like bodies, by familiar bodies, and it

shelters itself in the group, signaling conspiracy or terror; and it is working the

earth, digging a trench, lifting a pipe, or hacking at weeds with a hoe—it is doing

what it knows and what it is capable of doing. And the observer understands these

cues and racializes that body, extending that understanding outside the fields and

into the social imaginary.

But if we can free ourselves from prejudice, or relate to it phenomenologically,

the “illegal” immigrant body is, simply, a body. What this “unprejudiced” sort of

reading drives us to conclude is that we don't know anything about the person with

the body, since it is clear that the body is a mystery. Famously, Descartes is so

troubled by this mystery that he relegates his own body to the realm of things (the

res extensa), since things are easier to figure out. For us, it tell us that if knowledge

of one’s body is an enigma, knowledge of the other’s body and of what it hides, or

protects, is an (philosophical) impossibility.

Our attempts to read the skin of the other always fall short. Hence, we lazily

objectify bodies to make them easier to digest. But what we digest are usually our

own prejudices—or the prejudices fed to us by media spectacle or other public

discourses. Linda Alcoff rightly observes that we racialize the immigrant body to

make it intelligible (2005). We racialize in order to digest, to consume, to feed our

desire to remain unique, or different, or individual, or informed.

Conclusion

Our post-911 condition has normalized the objectification of bodies for the sake

of freedom and security. As we inch closer to accepting the “truth” of a post-racial

10 Carlos Alberto Sánchez

world, as we buy into what Ian Heney-Lopez has called “the ideology of

colorblindness” (2006, 148ff), we turn our xenophobic rhetoric away from race and

toward suspect behavior. We hear that the perpetrator was acting suspiciously

before his arrest, before we hear anything about his race or ethnicity. But our

perception is all encompassing: we seek the suspected behavior because we seek

race!

Consequently, the immigrant is reasonably suspected because there is always a

reason—for instance, he is a Mexican or a Muslim who has been given away by his

body! The perverse rationality of anti-immigration legislation takes advantage of the

fact that our senses are, at least in pre-theoretical life, the privileged source of

justification. So those looking for illegal immigrants will believe they will find them

by simply looking into a crowd, and looking for bodies which fit the prejudice; for

bodies that bend a little at the neck; for bodies with callous hands and dark burnt

skin; for bodies draped in ethnic uniforms.

The “illegal” immigrant problem is really about society’s inability to allow a

mystery to remain a mystery and an incapacity to treat the other with respect and

generosity—this is too much to ask given our current age of suspicion and terror.

The problem is exacerbated by the fact that “illegals” cannot participate in the

process of their own legitimization. There is no game that allows that. Those that

proclaim that “illegals break the law,” do not understand that there is no alternative.

To be an “illegal” immigrant is to be outside the law. Hence, the phrase “illegals

break the law” is a phrase couched in the very paradox of illegality that wants

“illegals” to both be and not be within the space of law. It is a stubborn paradox

simply because it seems to cohere nicely with a discourse of illegality that, as we’ve

seen, is itself couched in irrational fear, prejudice, and myth.

Works Cited

Alcoff, Linda Martin. 2005. Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self. New

York: Oxford University Press.

Armendariz, Agustin. 2011. “Immigrants Drawn to California, data shows,”

California Watch. January 5. Accessed January 5, 2011.

http://californiawatch.org/dailyreport/immigrants-drawn-california-data-shows-

7839.

Berestein, Leslie. 2005. “Highway safety sign becomes running story on

immigration.” The San Diego Union Tribune. April 10. Accessed February 23,

2011.

http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20050410/news_1n10signs.html.

Feb. 23, 2011.

Benhabib, Seyla. 2004. The Rights of Others: Citizens, Residents, and Aliens.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Chavez, Leo. 2008. The Latino Threat: Constructing Immigrants, Citizens, and the

Nation. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Ken Knabb. Berkeley,

CA: Bureau of Public Secrets.

“Illegal” Immigrants: Law, Fantasy, and Guts 11

Dummett, Michael. 2001. On Immigration and Refugees. London and New York:

Routledge.

Dykes, Bret Michael. 2011. “Proposed Texas Immigration Bill Contains Convenient

Loophole for ‘the help’,” The Lookout. March 2. Accessed May 7, 2014.

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/proposed-texas-immigration-law-contains-

convenient-loophole-help-20110302-091149-218.html

Foucault, Michel. 1995. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated

by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books.

Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. Translated by John McQuarrie and

Edward Robinson. New York: Harper and Row.

Lillich, Richard B. 1984. The Human Rights of Aliens in Contemporary

International Law. Manchester, U.K: Manchester University Press.

Lopez, Ian Haney. 2006. White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race. New

York: New York University Press.

Ngai, Mae M. 2004. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern

America. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Passan, Jeffrey S., Paul Taylor. 2010. “Unauthorized Immigrants and their U.S.

Born Children.” Pew Research Hispanic Trends Project. August. Accessed

December 2, 2012. http://www.pewhispanic.org/2010/08/11/appendix-b-

methodology-2/

Preston, Julia. 2010. “Illegal Immigrant Students Protest at McCain Office,” The

New York Times, May 17. Accessed December 22, 2011.

Riddle, Debbie. 2011. H.B. 1202. 82nd

Legislative Session, Texas. Web:

http://www.capitol.state.tx.us/tlodocs/82R/billtext/pdf/HB01202I.pdf#navpa

nes=0

Sarat, Austin, Lawrence Douglas, Martha Merrill Umphrey. 2010. Law and the

Stranger. Stanford: Stanford University Press.