Working through ideas on Arendt and undocumented people in the U.S….

I hope this isn't too tangential for a response, but Arendt’s chapter on “The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man” has me thinking a lot about what human rights groups are saying and doing about undocumented workers and undocumented people in the U.S.  Her critique is spot on in its discussion of the ineffectual nature of human rights groups, and it seems productive to think through current issues in tandem with her insights.

First, I was thinking about the U.N. and the role of human rights in the immigration issue in the U.S.  For example, the U.N. admonished the U.S. in 2010 because of Arizona’s immigration laws – but this posting on Judicial Watch points out that such an admonition borders on comedy.  What is comedic, of course, is the fact that U.S. does not—and does not have to—listen to the U.N. because there are no real consequences for not adhering those warnings.  So, this section has me thinking about undocumented people outside of a human rights framework, which I guess is the framework I’ve always looked at it through.  The stages that Arendt outlines are: first losing your home, then your citizenship, and finally, your rights because human rights are really “citizen rights” rather than human rights and explains that “the real situation of those whom the twentieth century has driven outside the pale of the law shows that those are rights of citizens who loss does not entail absolute rightlessness” (375). 

We know that these conditions led to the Nazi’s expulsion and elimination of the Jews.  And the German state had the power to strip Jews of citizenship or give them second-class citizenship, which is different from the condition of illegal immigrants in the U.S. who never had U.S. citizenship to be stripped.  (and this gets complicated for me to think through since some have citizenship in the country they immigrated from...this is something I’m unfamiliar with and couldn’t readily find information about: are there undocumented people in the U.S. who do not have citizenship in another country?).  But perhaps the U.S. can be seen as stripping people of citizenship in its treatment of undocumented workers, who it is clear that the country relies on for labor.

The U.S. in this regard is a state apparatus that not only tolerates, but encourages the exploitation of undocumented peoples.  Obviously, the sentiment is nothing new, but I had not thought of it in these exact terms before because it seems to me that Arendt’s argument would place the state in a position of blame in this scenario.  The narrative of immigration in the news and from what I know about the courts is about the state being a strange kind of victim of people who enter the country that it is now meant to provide basic rights to…and the state doesn’t want to do it.  Until this discourse is changed, there is no logical (juridical?) argument that one can make about how the state is oppressing these people, is there?

In keeping with this train of thought, Arendt explains that “their plight is not that they are not equal before the law, but that no law exists for them; not that they are oppressed but that nobody wants even to oppress them,” and further down the page: “no country would claim these people” (375).  But if we agree that the U.S. does in fact want to oppress them, then what is the role of their home country to "claim them"? I hadn’t previously thought about how US/China and US/Mexico relationships handle this issue, for example.  Does each country see it as a specific state issue?  If thinking about how the worst atrocities are created under condition in which people are not “claimed’ by a country, how can the U.S.’s role be understood?

I fear that I’m way oversimplifying this discussion, but I hope it will be received in the spirit of me trying to enter into and learn more about a major issue with many arguments of which I’m fairly ignorant.