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.
The talk will take place on Tuesday, October 15th from 4 – 6pm in the Wolff Conference Room (1103), in the 6 E 16th street building.
Daniel M. Goldstein is Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University. He studies the global meanings and practices of security, democracy, and human rights. He is concerned with questions of law, violence, and social justice for marginalized urban people in Latin America and the United States. His first book was an ethnography titled The Spectacular City: Violence and Performance in Urban Bolivia, published by Duke University Press in 2004. This was followed in 2010 by a collection titled Violent Democracies in Latin America (co-edited with Desmond Arias) and in 2012 by a second ethnography, titled Outlawed: Between Security and Rights in a Bolivian City, both from Duke University Press.
