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. 

the law

I'm not very familiar with law or writing about law, so I'm just going to share some of bits I got from this piece, in no necessarily coherent order.

Clarifying questions:
1) I'm sure we were going to do this anyway, but could we talk about Benjamin's "Critique of Violence" and exactly what his argument is laying out for us? I think I'm getting the gist but sometimes he loses me. Important connections to Mieville that I see include natural/positive law and policing.

2) Page 136-7: could we possibly go over how China Mieville's Between Equal Rights connects law, violence  sovereignty, and self-help in this section? Not quite sure I'm getting it. What does "self-help" mean?

Some important quotes from that area are: "To understand, as Pashukanis clearly does, that robbery (non-consensual possession of another's commodity) goes hand-in-hand with trade (consensual trade of commodities), is to understand that violence is implicit in the commodity, and therefore legal, form." (134)
"Law and violence are inextricably linked as regulators of sovereign claims." (135)

Other questions:
3) In the quotes above and especially in talking about McDougal, Mieville makes the important observation that "Interpretation is not something we do to understand the law, it is the process that is law" (39). He also says that "Having dispensed with formalism, law must be part of the political process. This means that law itself is a political process, and the 'meanings' and applications of legal norms cannot be pre-determined. They are constituted in interpretation, contextually" (41). This makes a lot of sense to me and also brings up questions of translation--ultimately I think one of Mieville's main points is that law is translated into all these possibilities, both positive and negative, but because it is based on violence and capital/commodification, law is "fundamentally unreformable" (3)*. The end of law would mean global emancipation (318). But how do we imagine this end of law, and wouldn't there always be a problem of translation?

4) Random but related to what we've been talking about.... an excerpt from Naoki Sakai's "Modernity and Its Critique: The Problem of Universalism and Particularism":

the West is never content with what it is recognized as by its others; it is always urged to approach others in order to ceaselessly transform its self-image; it continually seeks itself in the midst of interaction with the Other; it would never be satisfied with being recognized but would wish to recognize others; it would rather be a supplier of recognition than a receiver thereof. In short, the West must represent the moment of the universal under which particulars are subsumed. Indeed, the West is particular in itself, but it also constitutes the universal point of reference in relation to which others recognize themselves as particularities. And, in this regard, the West thinks itself to be ubiquitous. (95)

particularism and universalism do not form an antimony but mutually reinforce each other. As a matter of fact, particularism has never been a truly disturbing enemy of universalism or vice versa. Precisely because both are closed off to the individual who can never be transformed into the subject or what infinitely transcends the universal, neither universalism nor particularism is able to come across the Other; otherness is always reduced to the Other, and thus repressed, excluded, and eliminated in them both. And after all, what we normally call universalism is a particularism thinking itself as universalism, and it is worthwhile doubting whether universalism could ever exist otherwise. (98)

I thought this could be a point in thinking about genocides and the Holocaust--if we say that the Holocaust cannot be compared, we are making it particular (or are we making it universal, as the thing every other genocide is compared to?), and this just gets us into the problem of never getting us out of this universalism/particularism loop. Just a side note..... I feel there's more to say about this but can't think right now.


*important quotes i want to point out but don't have time to contextualize:
"disputation and contestation is intrinsic to the commodity, in the fact that its private ownership implies the exclusion of others. Similarly, violence--coercion--is at the heart of the commodity form, and thus the contract. For a commodity meaningfully to be 'mine-not-yours'--which is, after all, central to the fact that it is a commodity to be exchanged--some forceful capabilites are implied. If there were nothing to defend its 'mine-ness', there would be nothing to stop it becoming 'yours', and then it would no longer be a commodity, as I would not be exchanging it. Coercion is implicit." (126)
International law "is the dialectical result of the very process of conflictual, expanding inter-polity interaction in an age of early state forms and mercantile colonialism. [. . .] International law embodies the violence of colonialism and the abstraction of commodity exchange. It is . . . that international law is colonialism" (169)
"Colonialism is in the very form, the structure of international law itself, predicated on global trade between inherently unequal polities, with unequal coercive violence implied in the very commodity form. This unequal coercion is what forces particular content into the legal form." (178)
sovereignty is a "theory of independence, not equality" (185)