Fall 2015 Lecture: Securitized Immigration and the Electronic Surveillance of Workers in the United States by Prof. Daniel Goldstein
The Janey Program in Latin American Studies 2015 Fall Lecture:
Securitized Immigration and the Electronic Surveillance of Workers in the United States
Daniel M. Goldstein
Department of Anthropology
Rutgers University
OCTOBER 15TH 4PM | WOLFF CONFERENCE ROOM
6E 16TH ST. 11TH FLOOR
The border surrounding the territory of the United States has been interiorized. As efforts intensify to police immigration in the name of creating “Secure Communities” (until recently a centerpiece of the Obama administration’s immigration policy), the locus of securitization has become the spaces within national borders, including states and local municipalities. The workplace, too, has been transformed into a site of immigration enforcement through the use of an electronic program called “E-Verify,” a system that identifies those eligible to work legally in the United States. With this technology, immigration enforcement deputizes private sector employers as immigration police while it attempts to exclude the undocumented from the workforce. This invisible policing generates fear intended to penetrate immigrant subjectivities and produce passive enforcement, or “self-deportation” – supporters of E-Verify hope that immigrants themselves will decide to remove their unwanted and undocumented bodies from U.S. national space. This talk examines this technology, its many flaws, and the effects it produces among undocumented Latin American workers in central New Jersey, who now face new threats to their livelihoods and new paths to deportation.