Deporting democracy: The politics of immigration and sovereignty

This project critically investigates the politics of immigration. It proposes a political cosmopolitan perspective that illuminates the role of immigrants' political action and rights claims in challenging coercive institutions of sovereignty and altering the shape of the political community. Conversely, democratic politics suffers when anti-immigrant discourses and racialized immigration enforcement prevail. Democracy needs public spaces that welcome difference and plurality for the excluded to put forward revised and expanded understandings of community. In this sense, the way democracies deal with immigration acts as a canary in the coal mine. This is because actions taken to prevent immigration and to enforce immigration regulations result in racial hierarchies within the polity and silence legitimate voices of democratic contestation. To make this case, the dissertation addresses four dimensions of immigration politics: (i) it theorizes how international hierarchies shape the domestic politics of immigration; (ii) it criticizes assumptions of individual or collective benevolence toward immigrants and instead explores political sources of hostility; (iii) it theorizes immigrants as political subjects and highlights the role of their activism in democratic politics; (iv) it theorizes the effects of institutions of immigration enforcement in fostering (or preventing) immigrant political action and, ultimately, a thriving democracy. I examine the work of liberal-egalitarians and deliberative democratic approaches, arguably among the most welcoming of immigrants. Given my focus on immigrants as political subjects and the dangers of depoliticizing immigration, these schools are important interlocutors. They, if any, should offer normative scripts with the most emancipatory potential for immigrants. Regardless of this, they fall short of recognizing immigrants as political actors. The theoretical exploration concludes that in the context of unbalanced power in the international realm and domestic polities characterized by racial inequality, the case for defending sovereign prerogatives to control borders and domestic enforcement grows very weak. This project illuminates instances of injury and closure of spaces of democratic politics that characterize the contemporary immigration regime. A cosmopolitan approach highlights that these spaces of oppression within democracies are facilitated by the assertion of a sovereign right to exclude. It also identifies immigrants as legitimate political subjects that challenge sovereignty from within.