Legal migrants can be rendered illegal to make them disposable labor

Evidence

As De Genova argues, illegality as a political identity frames migration through the terms of selective inclusion and exclusion imposed by conditions of state control and popular representation. In other words, legal migrants can be rendered illegal through the codes and practices that enact social and cultural boundaries. The goal is a process of inclusion through illegalization within the global economy and the selective enforcement of state controls of deportability (De Genova 2002, 440). In this framework, workers are accepted into informal global labor migration markets that also deem them dispensable in times of crisis and thus disposable through deportation. — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 655

Categorization

• XREF: This selective-inclusion-through-illegalization logic parallels the liberal-capitalist governance critiques in Milgrom’s private law merchant chapters and the informality of extralegal regimes in the diamond trade reading. — connects to: Migrant farm-worker lawsuits, not mainstream environmentalism, drove the U.S. DDT ban — Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up: Environmental…, 161; Importing outside labor to extraction zones prevents local civic and union organizing — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 193