Immigrant rights double as the metric of native working-class citizenship vigor

Evidence

The immigrant in Europe today is articulated thus in terms of at least three overdetermining and interacting racially driven economies, to riff on Balibar: First, an economy of labor serving as lure into a workforce to perform work no (or very few) locals will and to sustain retirement benefits for an aging population. Second, a moral economy enabling Europe to face itself as sustaining a humanity struggling to meet the moral standards it has set itself for refugees fleeing wars, politically fashioned famines, and natural disasters. And third, a political economy where the local politics of possibility veers, often wildly, between access and begrudging, assimilating acceptance, on one side of the ledger, and aggressive, even violent denial and restriction, on the other. The protection of (the rights accorded) immigrants constitutes not only an important register of “the vigor of citizenship,” as Balibar puts it in We, the People of Europe?, but also an abstract yet vital metric of the status, the rights, of the local working classes. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 935

Categorization

• XREF: The metric-of-citizenship logic is precisely the cross-axis mechanism the reader hunts: immigrants as the visible baseline against which native privilege is measured — connect to Milgrom reputation-signaling work where outsiders’ standing calibrates insiders. — connects to: Immigrant rights protection serves as a barometer of local working-class rights — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 935; Native Americans restricted births to keep class standing, enabling biological replacement by immigrants — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 853

Broader Connections

• Immigrant rights protection serves as a barometer of local working-class rights #corroborates (0.92) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 935