Unjust History and Its New Reproduction—A Reply to My Critics

Demands calling for reparations for historical injustices—injustices whose original victims and perpetrators are now dead—constitute an important component of contemporary struggles for social and transnational justice. Reparations are only one way in which the unjust past is salient in contemporary politics. In my book, Injustice and the Reproduction of History: Structural Inequalities, Gender and Redress, I put forward a framework to conceptualise the normative significance of the unjust past. In this article, I will engage with the insightful comments and try to address the concerns of the contributors to the symposium on my book. I will discuss (i) whether and in what sense my framework incorporates past-regarding duties, (ii) how it is different from causal interpretations of the relationship between past and present injustice, (iii) whether it can carve out a greater place for blame in our thinking about responsibility for (historical) structural injustice, (iv) whether such a responsibility needs to hinge upon an account of solidarity, and (v) how de-temporalising injustice can cast new light on immigration politics. In particular, I will stress and further clarify the importance that the notion of ‘structural debt’, which my book develops to reflect on historical responsibility, can play in thinking about what is owed to an unjust history.

The Politics of the President’s Immigration Rhetoric

Although research on immigration politics is extensive, few scholars have systematically connected immigration politics to the president’s rhetoric over time. This is surprising since all modern presidents have referenced immigration in their public statements and presidents play a central role in setting the policy agenda. The primary purpose of this paper is to explain the president’s immigration rhetoric since 1953. Thus, we collect all presidential speeches on immigration through the Obama Administration, calculating the president’s monthly attention to immigration, and the relative negativity of the president’s remarks. We theorize that presidents’ motivation to speak about immigration policy is driven by the attention others devote to immigration policy, and key interventions in the immigration policy debate. Rhetorical tone, we think, is a function of the changing policy definition of immigration generated by Prop 187 and the Post-911 era. Our results show that the content of presidential rhetoric on immigration is indeed a product of these factors, providing us with clear evidence as to when the president devotes public attention to one of the central issues of American politics.

At the Borders of the Body Politic: Fetal Citizens, Pregnant Migrants, and Reproductive Injustices in Immigration Detention

To analyze intersecting power relations in reproductive and immigration politics, I examine Garza v. Hargan (an appellate case regarding unaccompanied immigrant minors’ abortion rights) alongside systemic injustices in immigration detention (e.g., exposure to miscarriage risks, coerced sterilization, shackling). These injustices, I argue, emerge from conflicts and compromises over fetal citizenship within the American radical right. Although pro-life and anti-immigrant discourses assume opposing logics of citizenship, respectively interpreting immigrants’ fetuses as “fetal citizens” or “anchor babies,” these contradictions are neutralized by two techniques. Debilitation (systematic degradation of a disposable population) enables the appearance of fetal protection to coexist with de facto exposure to death, injury, and risk. Paralegality (quasi-legal policy making by enforcement agents) allows situational shifts in the meaning of fetal citizenship and adjustments to the pro-life/anti-immigrant compromise. Both obscure culpability for reproductive injustice, reinforce interlocking oppressions, and control women’s bodies in order to control the body politic’s demographic future.

Part I International Refugee Law— Reflections on the Scholarly Field, Ch.5 The Politics of International Refugee Law and Protection

This chapter evaluates how politics and power dynamics permeate the story of international refugee law and protection. Historically, scholars of politics have been more likely to study the causes of displacement; there have been fewer studies focused on the politics of reception, that is, how displaced people are treated, processed, and categorized when they flee. Part of the explanation for this puzzling feature of the scholarly literature is that the discipline of political science has tended to study immigration politics as part of domestic politics, assuming immigrants are economically motivated, and bracketing refugees as a niche foreign policy issue. A further explanation is that international refugee protection is often assumed to be simply a legal matter, not shaped by politics. The chapter argues that the global refugee regime looks the particular way it does because powerful political forces and dynamics have shaped and constrained it. In order to understand the politics of international refugee law and protection, one cannot just look at the law itself. To understand what the law means in practice, one must examine protection law in the context of both international geopolitics and the domestic politics of border control, state formation, and ongoing nation-building. The chapter then outlines seven key facets of the politics of international refugee law and protection.