2014 Volume 65 Issue 2 Pages 194-209
Since 2006, we have witnessed continuing tidal waves of social movements by undocumented immigrants and their supporters in diverse forms in the United States, i.e. from mass demonstration for immigration reform to small scale protests against immigration raids. These social movements seem to seek economic, social, and political rights within national paradigm against the impacts of the globalization, but it must be understood as resistances against a new globalist form of governmentality, i. e. the emerging immigration regulatory system which has integrated the local, national, and transnational levels by incorporating rapidly developing technology of surveillance based on various digital information technology, including biometrics. At the same time, irregular immigrants have pursued social justice in terms of job opportunity, income level, medical care, as well as opportunity of higher education and later decent occupations for immigrants' children. This article analyzes following: 1) restructured immigration enforcement bureaucracy and immigrants' experience of apprehension, detention, and deportation; 2) forms and strategies of social movements against newly intensified enforcement strategies; 3) social movements to impose local regulatory rules on unregulated markets through their locally accumulated power; and 4) two case studies of immigration raid in Los Angeles county to elucidate the interactions between the logic of the global markets and the globalist new forms of governmentality and their impacts on immigrant communities.
