How are you experiencing the influence of borders and boundaries on your body and the bodies of others?

Yes, it's true. Although every racial/ethnic group shares a similar history of oppression, Asian groups have been unique in that we are seen as "perpetually foreign."

As far as legislative and legal history, Japanese laborers began to replace Chinese laborers after the Exclusion Act, but the "Gentleman's Agreement" in 1907 stops Japanese immigration. Roosevelt also banned Korean labor migration during that year. In 1923, the Supreme Court declared that Asian Indians, although not East Asians, were still ineligible for naturalization because they were not sufficiently white. Asian non-citizens also could not legally own land for much of the 20th Century. In 1922, the Cable Act said that a citizen marrying an Asian non-citizen could lose their citizenship. Also interesting to note, the economic class character of Asian immigrants began to slowly change after the 1965 Immigration Act.

Re: Muslims- shortly after 9/11, days after Bush made a public appearance with Muslim American leaders proclaiming that Islam is peace, over 2,000 Muslims were rounded up and put into Guatanamo (I think that was the number). About a year or two later (I think), 1,500 of these people had been released without charge. One of the many events driving me crazy that year.

It is also worthwhile to note that the Japanese American Citizens League, historically criticized for not fighting internment and instead facilitating it, spoke up against the rounding up of Muslims.

My parents came on a student visa. We got citizenship because of special legislation passed after Tiananmen Square, which allowed a large number of Chinese international students to get Greencards.

One brief note is that the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the first and only ethnically based immigration act in the US.

Really im here to think about my own legality in this system. Something that really hit me about the "don't assume your legal" piece of our discussion is that the US Govt., our government, can and has approved policies where a "legal" US citizen can overnight become "illegal". I'm speaking to Executive Order 9066 issued by President Franklin Roosevelt during WWII, where approximately 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans (62 percent US citizens) were relocated to internment camps. Some of whom also had their US citizen status stripped from theme. This says alot about the drastic measures that this government will take when there is an epidemic of fear running through the collective conciousness. Can you imagine if after Sept. 11 all the muslim citizens were rounded up and put in camps? Who knows, maybe they are.

This question is so big I really couldn't think of where to start, but maybe I'll start by pointing out the nexus of race and class vis-a-vis immigration and criminal systems' power to illegalize human beings:

"I mighta been born here but I'm a foreigner" - The Coup, 5 Million Ways To Kill A CEO

Between 61-95% of all deportation cases observed by the National Lawyers Guild Detention Working Group (over 500 cases) during 2005-2006 involved criminal conviction as the basis for deportation (the basis for deportation was not captured for 34% of the cases observed, but suffice to say the percentage is very high).

There is a political economy aspect to this, that one function of illegality is the management of surplus labor required to depress wages. Lowering of thresholds for deportable offenses mirrors minimum sentencing guidelines etc. behind the prison boom.

Disenfranchisement of felony voters, threats of deportation against workers who attempt to organize, and all forms of detention and imprisonment act to discipline and disorganize oppressed communities. Required for this containment strategy are ICE, police, and other agents of fascist supremacy (capitalist, racist).

After Nixon borrowed Goldwater's law and order platform and made it his own (fear of blacks, fear of the poor, resentment about war on poverty, resentment about civil rights movt), the liberal left has largely abandoned defending those who get caught up in the criminal system in the face of such a successful right-wing electoral strategy.

It is no suprise, then, that the Democratic-Republican compromise bill includes, among other things, further lowering of threshold for deportable criminal convictions, more indefinite detention, encouragement of local police to enforce immigration law, and other provisions that either target immigrants in the criminal system explicitly or through disproportionate impact.

It may be out of concerns for mainstream appeal that liberal groups often do not take up the cause of the immigrants entering into detention and deportation proceedings due to criminal conviction (read: fear of brown people), but this is unprincipled and misguided. It is also a bad strategy in the long term. For one thing, it forestalls possibilities for multi-issue organizing. And given that the criminal and immigration systems are two different sides of the same coin as far as their function in labor market regulation within global economic restructuring, it forestalls the possibility of cross-issue alliances.

Organizing and movement-building groups must now figure out how to respond to the legislative compromise which is almost surely coming.

The fear of immigrants that invites people to support a fascist response from the state is clearly grounded in the realm of the irrational yet every approach to intervene on behalf of the oppressed begins to limit itself by a framework that must first legitimate both, borders and the state.

For subversive action to become truly transformative we must begin to tackle that within ourselves that understands itself as tied to the very structures that dehumanize us. We must not surrender our constitutive power, as long as we continue to do this, our action will remain relegated to the margins where it so comfortably resides.

The very posing of this question places DS4SI at the most hopeful space for social transformation, the place that liberates the imagination.

During our first conveneing of BBB, We read an article called Borderdevice(s) by Multiplicity. We got the article out of Bruno Latour's Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy.

Multiplicity has a website!

http://www.multiplicity.it

Check it out. You can read Borderdevice(s) there.