Rights,obligations and the making of modern immigration laws

Abstract

States across the United States are increasingly enacting harsh and punitive immigration laws to encourage what proponents refer to as self-deportation. This paper examines the ideological forces that are nurturing and legitimizing this movement. It specifically focuses on the notion of the good citizen as an ideological construct that inherently makes the undocumented immigrant a threat that must be neutralized for the sake of maintaining law and order. In this way, the good citizen emerges as a natural threat to the undocumented immigrant, as the good citizen is presumably first and foremost obligated to be law-abiding, including upholding laws that aim to push undocumented immigrants to self-deport. This paper looks at how these new immigration laws reify and expand this threat through the notion of good citizenship.