Undocumented: How Immigration became Illegal ?

In 2015, the American teacher, historian, author, and activist Aviva Chomsky published a book to counteract the wave of anti-immigration and anti-Latino sentiments that were growing in the context of the US’ elections of 2016, under the title of “Undocumented: How Immigration became illegal?”.  In this book, divided into eight chapters, Chomsky addresses different aspects of American history and economic and legal instruments that have produced the conception of illegality of migration in the United States.

Daughter of the famous author and philosopher Noam Chomsky, Aviva Chomsky is an American author and professor of history in different universities, such as Harvard or Salem State. Moreover, she is a political activist for social rights and has specialized in the social and economic history of several South American countries in relation to U.S. industry.

In the first chapter of the book, Chomsky challenges U.S. anti-immigration rhetoric. This section uncovers the social costs of deportation, which are often masked by laws which construct people as illegals. Chomsky argues that the inclusion of immigrants in the body politic produced a dual labor market linked to the racial order. In one hand, industrialized labor, which involved immigrants from Western and Eastern Europe, allowed for upward mobility. In contrast, racialized labor has been organized through racial logics, justifying slavery until the mid-19th century, then throughout different programs and laws Mexicans were allowed to work temporarily, but were unable to become permanent U.S. residents. This dual labor market denies racialized workers and structures their work through unbalanced relationships that undermine workers’ organizing for basic rights. In the next two chapters, she points out to the legal instruments that construct the consideration of Central American migrants as “illegal”. She traces back to the immigration policies in 1965 to illustrate the background of the current situation. Moving on in the book, chapters four, five and six look closely at daily lives of undocumented immigrants and also those with a precarious status in the US. The author illustrates the way in which racial profiling, denial of rights and services, together with exploitative work conditions blur lines between the legality of migration for the people. Also, she highlights who are the beneficiaries from the criminalization and dehumanization of immigrants, like some communities and large corporations. Chapter seven focuses on the consequences on families, with some hope on undocumented youth who are compromising themselves into mobilization for rights and, at the same time, challenging the public’s notion of who belong. The last chapter concludes with a comprehensive general view of the social processes that construct states of “illegality” on migrants to sum up with her multidisciplinary explanation of this construction and the consequences it has on migrants’ lives.

In my view, this book helps to understand how migration has become criminalized to the point of creating a category of “illegal” with respect to a person’s movement. An important work is done in giving a historical, political and legal vision of this criminalization of migration, closely related to the concept of the nation-state and the protection of borders. I believe that it raises a series of ideas that can be extrapolated to other geographical contexts, such as Europe, with the growing militarization of borders, and the increased criminalization of migrants who arrive “illegally” to European territory.