State-Based Immigration Efforts and Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs): An Experiment in Alabama

Abstract

Being recognized as an immigrant has become a strange, and increasingly dangerous, identity cocktail in the US South in the twenty-first century. Current American federal immigration policy is built upon a legacy system that has systematically constructed a racialized, transnational, exploitative and dangerous migration system for those immigrating to the United States—concerns well established and explored from a variety of perspectives in the relevant academic literature (Massey 2008; Ngai 2004; Odem and Lacy 2009; Sadowski-Smith 2009; Weise 2009a, 2009b; Winders 2011). The most recent twist in the nation’s immigration policy has been the emergence of state-level, state-initiated policies of “enforcement by attrition,” more commonly known as “self-deportation” (McWhorter 2012). These self-deportation policies are characterized by their intentional creation of a set of conditions collectively mandating surveillance of a community, by that same community, resulting in living conditions characterized by a perpetual threat of persecution. This threat of detainment and/or deportation is intended to be so pervasive that unauthorized immigrants will choose to “self-deport” to another state to escape the omnipresent risk for persecution. One policy approach that states used to accomplish these ends was to require documentation proving authorized presence for virtually all aspects of community life (e.g., contracts, schools, traffic stops, etc.).