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States Without Nations: Citizenship for Mortals may not exist, but the book is now a reality. It was published this week by Columbia University Press as part of its series New Directions in Critical Theory, edited by Amy Allen.

I hope you judge it by the cover. (Thank you, Columbia designers!)

Here's the catalogue copy:

As citizens, we hold certain truths to be self-evident: that the rights to own land, marry, inherit property, and especially to assume birthright citizenship should be guaranteed by the state. The laws promoting these rights appear not only to preserve our liberty but to guarantee society remains just. Yet considering how much violence and inequality results from these legal mandates, Jacqueline Stevens asks whether we might be making the wrong assumptions. Would a world without such laws be more just?

Arguing that the core laws of the nation-state are more about a fear of death than a desire for freedom, Stevens imagines a world in which birthright citizenship, family inheritance, state-sanctioned marriage, and private land ownership are eliminated. Would chaos be the result? Drawing on political theory and history and incorporating contemporary social and economic data, she brilliantly critiques our sentimental attachments to birthright citizenship, inheritance, and marriage and highlights their harmful outcomes, including war, global apartheid, destitution, family misery, and environmental damage. It might be hard to imagine countries without the rules of membership and ownership that have come to define them, but conjuring new ways of reconciling our laws with the condition of mortality reveals the flaws of our present institutions and inspires hope for moving beyond them.

And, yes, there are blurbs:

"Imagining governments and citizenship unbeholden to rules of birth-that is, cleaving the state from the family (i.e. the nation)-is the single most important thought experiment in political theory since John Rawls asked us to consider justice from a position of veiled ignorance. Jacqueline Stevens is not just a punchy provacateur, she is a careful scholar and an engaging writer. States without Nations is a must read for any scholar of the politics, sociology or legal studies of the state-and anyone concerned with distributive justice." — Dalton Conley, Dean for the Social Sciences, New York University


"States without Nations is a scathing indictment of kinship-based membership. In an argument as unrelenting as it is brilliant, Jacqueline Stevens challenges feminists, liberals, and, indeed, anyone who values peace and security, to join her in recognizing and rejecting kinship as the ultimate source of violence. This original and much-needed intervention will reshape debates in international relations, political science, and women's studies." — Jodi Dean, author of Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies

"States Without Nations is a brutal exposé of the violent and mutually implicating underpinnings of liberal theory and national identity, and it constitutes nothing less than an early attempt to reconceptualize and reorganize world citizenship anew. I find it brilliant, bold, breathtaking, pioneering, far-reaching, and visionary. There's nothing else quite like it." — John Evan Seery, professor of politics, Pomona College

"No myth needs exploding more urgently than that of the tight association of state with nation, of the exigencies of governance with the idea of people defined by culture and common descent. No misconception has done more damage in modern political theory. And no theorist is better positioned to explode this myth-in its birthright, where it lives, in its premises of blood and land and birth-than Jacqueline Stevens." — Jeremy Waldron, University Professor, New York University School of Law

Order Book

U.S. Citizen Deported to Mexico, Shipped to Guatemala, Now Held in Jail

(For an updated account, after speaking with Mark and his mother, Jeannie, please go here.)

Neil Rambana, an attorney in Florida who'd reported an earlier case of a client of his that ICE had misclassified as a noncitizen, is helping another US citizen, Mark, in the middle of a surreal and excruciating experience with the DHS. [Added 4/24/09 Immigration Judge William Cassidy in Atlanta wrongfully deported Mark on December 9, 2008 to Mexico, and from there he ended up in Guatemala via Nicaragua before returning to the U.S. on Tuesday, only to be arrested by DHS at the airport.]

Mark's family first learned he was in Guatemala when he called his brother, Tommy, last Friday from the US Consulate. The consular officer told Tommy that his adopted brother, born in North Carolina, was trying to return to the United States. The family contacted Rambana and he faxed a copy of Mark's adoption papers indicating his U.S. birth. That was good enough for the U.S. consulate to not only issue Mark a temporary U.S. passport, but to help him obtain a plane ticket for his return. But DHS only compounded their earlier injury once Mark arrived.

Instead of apologizing for their enormous mistake, DHS at the Atlanta airport accused Mark of illegal reentry and took him into custody. Rambana paraphrased what Mark was told, "Customs and border patrol say you have an order of deportation; you're reeentering after you've been deported."

Rambana has spoken to ICE agents in Atlanta and left messages, and has also spoken to the DHS desk attorney, who has the authority to dismiss charges and order Mark released.

DHS has ignored the legal presumption of US citizenship conferred by a US passport and falsely arrested Mark. So far no one has responded to Rambana's persistent requests for Mark's release.

As Neil and I were getting off the phone we talked about how odd it was that this sort of case had long stopped seeming unusual. I told him about some conversations I'd been having with a criminal attorney in Phoenix (will post soon) about the border patrol down there tearing up the birth certificates of Mexican-American teenage boys and judges deporting them, and then prosecutors charging them with illegal reentry. Neil said ruefully, "The worst part is that it's so outrageous that it's happening so often and beginning not to seem so outrageous."

(I sent the case information including the A number and Rambana's contact information to Barbara Gonzalez, an ICE spokeswoman who claims that ICE does not arrest U.S. citizens. Fingers crossed...)
-----------
UPDATE: Friday Morning, 4/24/09--Barbara Gonzalez was responsive. She called the ICE office in Atlanta and the DHS desk attorney to ask them to look into Mark's detention. Rambana sent me a note this morning saying that DHS is now acknowledging that Mark is a U.S. citizen and they are going to release him. I will be speaking shortly with his family.

UPDATE: Friday Noon, 4/24/09-- Mark is home with his mother. More tomorrow.

As I've written before, the only means of preventing US citizens and legal permanent residents from being wrongfully detained and deported, and not to deprive them of Constitutional rights to their citizenship and legal residence, is to provide everyone in deportation proceedings an attorney and the full due process protections of the U.S. Constitution. Under the U.S. Constitution, it is never legal to deport a U.S. citizen by mistake. Any laws, regulations, or DHS or DOJ practices with this effect must be stopped immediately, including the mandatory criminal alien deportation law.

In some cases the agents involved should not only be fired, but charged with kidnapping and false imprisonment.

One final note: Last year, when I was writing an article for The Nation about US citizens being deported, I sent ICE public affairs spokespersons Brandon Alvarez-Montgomery, Viriginia Kice, and Lori Haley documents indicating that Rene Saldivar, a US citizen, was being wrongfully detained in Eloy, Arizona. I was testing their statements that ICE did not knowingly detain US citizens. ICE failed. This time, although DHS in Atlanta ignored Mark's passport and arrested him, the ICE public affairs person in DC, Barbara Gonzalez, followed up on my inquiry and Mark was released.

It seems that DHS is finally acknowledging that its agents do arrest US citizens, the first step to ending not only the wrongful detention of U.S. citizens, but the archaic practice of banishment. The problem of US citizens being deported is a headline grabber, and that's unfortunate unless the complexities and traumas of the inane U.S.-Mexican border, indeed of any border, are understood as the main narrative driving the story.

The first deportations from England to the colonies were not criminals but vagrants, English nationals who were "caught" outside their parishes of birth. The thought was that if left uncontrolled, the free movement of peasants and paupers would overwhelm the cities. The barbarity of punishing people for moving across a national border will strike future generations as ridiculous as it would seem now to ship people out of San Francisco for the crime of moving there from Omaha, Nebraska--a distance much further, in many ways, than the distance between Mexico and the southern United States.

USA Today Story on Lawsuits against ICE by US Citizens and Legal Residents

The link for this is http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-06-24-Immigration-raids_N.htm?loc=interstitialskip
(June 24, 2008)

Citizens sue after detentions, immigration raids
By Emily Bazar, USA TODAY
LOS ANGELES — Nitin Dhopade, the chief financial officer for Micro Solutions Enterprises, was headed toward the accounting department on the afternoon of Feb. 7 to deliver checks he had just signed. Suddenly, he says, he encountered armed men and women wearing bulletproof vests and uniforms branded with "ICE," which stands for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Dhopade, 47, says he and 30 other administrative workers for the Van Nuys, Calif., company, which recycles used toner and ink cartridges, were marched down a stairwell lined by officers. The workers were ordered against a wall and told not to touch anything or use their cellphones. "There was no way you could leave. You were definitely detained," he says. "None of us were in handcuffs, but there was no way you could say 'I'm leaving.' "

That marked the beginning of a surprise raid that would result in the arrests of 138 suspected illegal immigrants, about one-fifth of MSE's workforce. Also swept up in the same raid were more than 100 U.S. citizens and legal residents, including Dhopade, a naturalized U.S. citizen from India. They say they were illegally detained at the factory for an hour when ICE agents blocked the doors and interrogated them, forbidding them to leave or go to the bathroom without an escort.

Whether their brief detention was a mere inconvenience or a flagrant violation of their constitutional rights is the subject of a growing debate that seems likely to be resolved in federal court. Immigration officials, charged with enforcing the law against the estimated 12 million undocumented foreigners in the USA, are mounting more raids at slaughterhouses, restaurants and factories.

Increasingly, U.S. citizens and legal residents who work alongside illegal immigrants are being detained and interrogated, too. And some, such as Dhopade, are filing claims or lawsuits against the government.

Dhopade says he was a victim of racial profiling by ICE. An ICE agent questioned him about his immigration status and his ability to speak English "because of my skin color," he says. "None of the white folks in the office … that I know of were asked for proof of citizenship. To be asked for proof of citizenship, in this country, it's an insult. This is the United States of America. This country does not require that."

In other immigration raids, citizens and legal, permanent residents have been taken to jail. Jesus Garcia, a former Texas poultry worker, was handcuffed and spent more than 30 hours in ICE custody this year, part of that time in jail. Two co-workers, both citizens, also were arrested. No charges were filed against them.

In April, the Center for Human Rights & Constitutional Law, a public interest law firm here, filed claims for damages on behalf of 114 MSE employees, all citizens or legal permanent residents, also called green-card holders. The claims allege that they were subjected to "false imprisonment" and "detention without justification" and seek $5,000 each in damages from the federal government.

The lawsuits and claims against the government are part of a strategy by immigration lawyers to halt or change workplace raids. Peter Schey, president and executive director of the center, acknowledges that "we're hoping the prospect of thousands of U.S. citizens over time filing claims for damages against the United States government might cause (ICE) to reconsider how these raids are conducted."

"You cannot in this country engage in group detentions of large numbers of people because you think a smaller number within the larger group has done something wrong," Schey says. At the Van Nuys plant, ICE "created a powerful atmosphere of fear and intimidation. People felt like they had been taken hostage."

The rationale for the raids

Julie Myers, the Department of Homeland Security's assistant secretary for ICE, says federal law, Supreme Court decisions and search warrants give ICE the authority to enter workplaces to question "all the people inside," including citizens. She declines to discuss the MSE case, citing the ongoing investigation. But she says ICE agents work fast to separate legal workers from suspected illegal ones.

"When we go in, a lot of people are pretending to be U.S. citizens, and then there are some people who are," she says. "Our goal is to make sure we work as quickly and efficiently as we can so that U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents are free to go."

The stepped-up enforcement protects U.S. workers, she says. "We're trying to create a culture of compliance … so that businesses would start to have incentives to hire only people who are legally entitled to work here."

Workplace arrests by ICE in 2007 were 10 times what they were in 2002. Last year, the agency charged 863 people with criminal violations, such as identity theft, and 4,077 for allegedly being in the country illegally. In 2002, ICE made 25 criminal and 485 immigration-related arrests. Workers arrested on criminal charges face jail time; those accused of being in the country illegally are subject to deportation.

So far this year, ICE has made 850 criminal arrests and detained 2,900 people on immigration violations.

ICE has three primary targets, Myers says: workers who steal the identities of U.S. citizens, such as those who use someone else's Social Security number to gain employment; work sites such as airports and naval bases, which could be particularly vulnerable to terrorist threats; and what Myers calls "egregious employers" — those who knowingly hire illegal workers.

Barbara Coe, chairwoman of the California Coalition for Immigration Reform, says raids "are providing the incentive for at least some of these illegal aliens to get out of here before they are deported. I don't think there are enough raids. There should be more." She says she's sorry legal residents are sometimes questioned during raids but believes ICE needs time to determine who is here legally.

So does Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington. "It's not the end of the world," he says of citizens who are detained. "These people were briefly inconvenienced. Too bad."

'My heart was racing'

Denise Shippy, nine months pregnant the day of the MSE raid, says it was more than an inconvenience.

She had planned to take off that afternoon for parent-teacher conferences and a doctor's appointment. But Shippy, 30, needed to train a receptionist to fill in for her while she was on maternity leave, so she took her two children to the office with her. The raid occurred as she settled Cassidy, 7, and Ricky, 9, into the mailroom for lunch.

As she left the mailroom, Shippy found the lobby filled with ICE agents, and she, the children and co-workers were herded in there. When Shippy tried to respond to an e-mail, she says, one ICE agent said, "Stop typing."

"My rights were violated," Shippy says. "I am a citizen of this United States. I was born here. I'm not who they're looking for. I wasn't allowed to leave. … I couldn't go anywhere and couldn't do anything. Neither could my children."

Although she was upset, she tried to calm her kids, she says. She needed to use the restroom, but held off because she didn't want an agent to accompany her.

"I didn't want to scare the heck out of my kids," she says. "I was trying to be cool and calm for my children. My heart was racing."

At one point, agents started escorting handcuffed workers — suspected illegal immigrants — from the factory floor out the front door. Her children asked why the workers were handcuffed, what they had done wrong and what would happen to them, she says.

"That was when I started getting angry," she says. "My kids should not have had to watch these things. They saw people being led out in handcuffs. These are people who are recognizable to my children."

Shippy, who gave birth to a boy on Feb. 19, returned to work June 9 and says she still feels justified in filing a claim.

"I'm not some money-hungry person," she says. "This is something I'm pretty passionate about. It shouldn't have happened the way it did."

Debate over the law

As long as ICE has a warrant to enter a workplace, Myers says, agents can conduct what she calls a "survey" to determine the legal status of "anyone within the premises."

She cites a 1984 Supreme Court ruling that said factory surveys during immigration raids don't amount to an unconstitutional detention or seizure of those being questioned, even U.S. citizens.

In its ruling, however, the Supreme Court emphasized that the employees in the factory were not prevented from moving around, continuing to work or leaving. The current raids are different from those the Supreme Court approved, Schey says.

ICE can question workers as long as the interaction is voluntary, "but what they're doing (now) is not that," he says, because workers think they have no choice except to answer questions — which may incriminate those here illegally.

Many workers caught in raids don't know they're not obligated to respond, regardless of their immigration status, says Kevin Johnson, dean of the University of California-Davis, law school. ICE "can ask people questions. That doesn't mean people have to respond," he says.

Schey suspects ICE is using search warrants as a pretext to enter workplaces and then arrest as many people as it can to get publicity. "It's in effect a group detention," he says, "not supported by probable cause, … not supported by any law."

Michael Wishnie, a professor at Yale Law School, argues that ICE cannot legally detain or arrest anyone without reasonable suspicion that a specific person broke the law. People should not be detained simply because "they work in the same factory as the person" for whom ICE has warrant, he says.

Kris Kobach, who teaches law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, counters that police sometimes have to detain a large group to find the lawbreakers among them. He cites, as an example, police looking for two drug dealers in a house where 10 people live. In such a drug raid, "police will reasonably close the doors to the house and detain everybody," he says.

The factory's owners

No fines or charges have been levied against MSE or its managers.

Brothers Avi and Yoel Wazana, immigrants from Israel, started the company in 1994. Last year, net revenue was $95 million. At MSE's headquarters, a 225,000-square-foot building in Van Nuys, workers clean, disassemble, reassemble and test old printer cartridges. Before the raid, MSE employed about 700 people here.

Myers declined to say what prompted the raid. However, ICE began auditing the company in May 2007, focusing on "I-9 forms," which employers use to document employees' legal status. As part of the I-9 process, employers must inspect at least two documents that show identity and legal status, including U.S. passports, Social Security cards or green cards.

MSE was "in compliance with I-9 requirements," says Schey, who also represents the company. "If some of the documents workers presented were fraudulent," MSE has "no way of determining that."

The next month, the company voluntarily began using a government database to verify the status of new hires, he says. Then the company didn't hear from the government for months, Schey says.

"They expected a letter," he says. "Instead, on Feb. 7, ICE comes in like gangbusters."

About 100 ICE agents raided the factory between 3:30 and 4 p.m., says Nora Preciado, an attorney with the National Immigration Law Center. Armed with a federal search warrant, they arrested 130 workers from Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras and other countries on suspicion of being in the country illegally. ICE also had arrest warrants for eight others, who were picked up at their homes or the factory. These eight, identified by ICE during the earlier check of documents, face criminal charges for making false claims of U.S. citizenship or presenting false documents.

Five people arrested in the raids have been deported, ICE says. The others remain, some in detention, some not, while fighting their deportation orders in court.

Avi Wazana did not comment on the cases against his former employees or the methods MSE used to check their immigration status. In an e-mail after the raid, however, he told some of his customers that "MSE … has rejected hundreds (possibly more) of applicants … due to improper documentation."

The ACLU and other legal aid groups sued ICE, saying the detained MSE workers should have been allowed access to attorneys when they reported for interviews after the raid. U.S. District Court Judge George Wu agreed, and ordered ICE to stop interviewing workers. ICE has since allowed lawyers to be present at any interview with MSE workers.

One of the workers interviewed without an attorney present was Maria, a 39-year-old Pacoima resident who worked at MSE for eight years. She asked that her last name not to be used, on the advice of her attorney. "I felt like I had to answer" questions from ICE, she says. "I didn't know about my rights."

Maria was a supervisor in charge of eight line workers. She says she entered the USA illegally 15 years ago from Mexico so she could give her children a better education. One of her three children, a 14-year-old girl, is a U.S. citizen.

Maria says she'll fight to remain in the USA because she doesn't want to be separated from her family, especially her daughter. The girl's father, Maria's longtime partner, is a U.S. citizen and will care for their daughter if Maria is deported.

"She's not going to leave," Maria says of the girl, an eighth-grader. "This is her country."

Jailed 'over a mistake'

ICE's raids foster discrimination, says Domingo Garcia, attorney for the League of United Latin American Citizens. "There's a lot of racial profiling. … If you look like a Hispanic, you're detained or arrested."

He says he plans to file a class-action, civil rights lawsuit on behalf of legal workers detained in raids, including Jesus Garcia, 27, a green-card holder from Mount Pleasant, Texas. Domingo Garcia says he will ask the court to prohibit ICE from conducting raids until it changes its policies to prevent racial profiling.

ICE agents went to Jesus Garcia's home on April 16 in conjunction with a raid on a nearby Pilgrim's Pride poultry processing plant, where he worked marinating chicken meat. Garcia, from Mexico, has been a legal permanent resident for a year and a half. When about 10 ICE agents and local sheriff's deputies knocked on his door, they told him he was using the wrong Social Security number, says his wife, Olivia Garcia, a U.S. citizen.

Though Garcia showed the agents his green card, they handcuffed him and jailed him. He was released a day and a half later after agents told him he wasn't the person they wanted, he says. He had spent the night in jail. "He said it was pretty bad," Olivia says. "People were crying and screaming."

Jesus Garcia, who has since left Pilgrim's Pride for another job, says the mishap cost him three days of work. "I worked hard to get my residency," he says. "And to take me to jail just over a mistake?"

Immigration Judge Reorders ICE to Release US Citizen Held in Georgia

Yesterday morning I posted something (see the post below this one) about a US citizen who was detained for 8 months in 2006. Immigration attorney Neil Rambana, in Tallahassee, Florida, who took the case pro bono, argued his client's US citizenship status successfully and the judge terminated the deportation proceedings. But last month Rambana's client was once again being held in a detention facility in Lumpkin, Georgia and once again facing removal proceedings. Since mid-May Rambana had been trying, unsuccessfully, to contact ICE attorneys and explain their error, or, as I see it, their crime of false imprisonment.

At 5 pm EST yesterday Rambana received a long overdue note from immigration judge William Cassidy in Atlanta that the client in question once again had his deportation order terminated. The circumstances surrounding this are somewhat confusing, as is the case with many transactions with the immigration bureaucracy. I am waiting until Rambana figures out exactly what happened before posting more details, hopefully later today.

One fact that is clear is that ICE twice detained the same US citizen, who is Latino, for more than 8 months, even though ICE has no jurisdiction over US citizens.

The image above is of William Lumpkin, former Senator and Governor of Georgia, and namesake for the town hosting the ICE detention center that held Rambana's client.

Lumpkin made his name by clearing Cherokees out of Georgia. He wrote a book called, Removal of the Cherokee Indians from Georgia, 1827- 1841.

Mary Young, the historian who is my source for this information, writes that Lumpkin's "sudden addiction to Indian removal" was a response to "his flagging political career."

See Mary Young, "The Exercise of Sovereignty in Cherokee Georgia," Journal of the Early Republic, 10 (1990), note 7, citing Carl J. Vipperman, "The 'Particular Mission' of Wilson Lumpkin," Georgia Historical Quarterly, 66 (Fall 1982), 295-316.

Centuries of Betrayal

Many of the details about René Saldivar's 8 month detention by ICE I describe in an article in The Nation (June 23, 2008), but space constraints did not permit including everything, so I thought I'd elaborate here.

René Saldivar was born in Mexico in 1967. But his father, Isidoro, was born in Three Point, Colorado, in 1919 and married René's mother before René's birth, and Isidoro met the other requirements for making René a natural born citizen.

Isidoro himself first went to Mexico with his family when he was 11 in 1930. That's when about a million US residents of Mexican descent, around 400,000 of whom were either citizens or legal residents, were illegally removed from the country by immigration raids bearing a shocking resemblance to the ones occurring now.

According to historians Francisco Balderrama and Raymond Rodrigíz, in their book Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s (1995): "[D]eportation procedures were made to order for wholesale violations of basic human rights. Mass raids and arrests were conducted without benefit of warrants. Individuals were often held incommunicado and not allowed to see anyone. Without the opportunity to post bail, deportees languised in jail until the next deportation train" (p. 52).

Like today's oversight hearings by the U.S. Congress condemning these abuses, in 1932 the Wickersham Commission exposed and denounced these abuses: "The apprehension and examination of supposed aliens are often characterized by methods which are unconstitutional, tyrannic and oppressive" (quoted on pp. 52-53). And like today, the agencies responsible for these abuses simply ignored the charges and continued their violations until the economic climate shifted and Mexicans were once again encouraged to return.

In 1940, at the age of 21, Isidoro Saldivar returned to the United States and started working in Stanislaus County, in Riverbank, where many of his children and their families still live. Some are machine operators at the Conagra plant. René had some problems coping with his father's and mother's deaths in the late 1990s and lives with his sister doing odd jobs and battling his demons, mostly staying free of any entanglements with the law. He served his first and only time in jail last summer, a couple months for a minor drug possession violation.

René's brother-in-law, Pastor Aquiles Rojas was planning to pick him up on his release date of October 12, but René wasn't there. According to ICE spokesman Brandon Alvarez-Montgomery, who revealed this in an email to me, Saldivar had actually been put into ICE custody in September. By the time Rojas went to the Modesto Honor Farm jail, Rene´ was in an isolation cell in Eloy, Arizona. He was so traumatized that he'd become catatonic and was given psychotropic drugs.

When I asked Alvarez-Montgomery why the jail wouldn't tell Rojas of Saldivar's location, he said that seemed strange. Alvarez-Montgomery told me that ICE agents are working with the Modesto sheriff's department and they would certainly have access to the database with information about Saldivar's detention.

The same disappearing is happening by the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department, which also did not tell Guzman's family of his whereabouts. They also had ICE-trained agents in their facility, and this had been the means of Guzman's deportation.

As the immigration judge told me, the US is quietly running a secret prison system, holding people without charges and keeping them in isolation from the people who might help gain their legal rights and liberty.

While Rene´ was in Eloy, his family in Riverbank was being harassed by the Modesto Sheriff's department. Twice they raided his sister's house looking to arrest René for missing his probation meetings, even though a probation officer in Modesto told me that when someone is put into ICE custody, this is entered in the inmate's release record. She also told me that this was not taken into account before issuing warrants, and that it was the inmate's responsibility to contact their probation officers, "even if they are deported" and explain the reasons for their absence.

This why Peter Guzman, another deported US citizen, was taken into custody at the border with a warrant for his arrest for missing a probation hearing. The government is abducting the weakest members of our society, and either hiding them from their families, or dropping them off in another country with $3, and then saying that the people who cannot reach their parents, wives, sisters, and children are supposed to be sending letters detailing their legal plight to a probation officer in another state or country.

Here is some more information about how hard it was to find René, as described by his brother-in-law, Aquiles Rojas, who is a US citizen, leads a congregation with about 250 parishoners in Riverbank, and is truly aghast at what occurred.

Unlike many people taken by ICE, René had someone who was a bit resourceful and was persistent in trying to locate him. Rojas said he called numerous immigration offices repeatedly, always leaving messages, never receiving any return calls. When he would reach someone, they never had information: "I left a lot of messages becasue we wanted to find out. I called immigration in Arizona in October. They told me they had no record of Saldivar. I called back to San Francisco. Nobody had no answer. But somebody had to have some record!" Rojas told me, exasperated.

In March, René called. Rojas and his wife drove 12 hours to Eloy to see René. The guards told him visitors were allowed only on weekends and holidays. But it was Good Friday, Rojas , the pastor, pointed out. That didn't count. Also, René had not submitted their names on the appropriate list authorizing visitors, so it would be too late for them to see him that weekend. "'I drove 12 hours from Central California,'" he tried to tell them, but "we weren't able to give him the papers. They don't receive papers. This is worse than the White House. I can talk to someone there. There, you can't talk to no one."

Rojas explained that his wife, René's sister, became a naturalized citizen 12 years earlier, but the other siblings had green cards. The parents "didn't know that the kids were US citizens. They applied for green cards, but i don't know why. It was a mistake. From the beginning they were US citizens."

After learning they couldn't leave the papers with the guards at Eloy Rojas drove about 100 miles to Tucson and mailed René his documents from there. "We also sent money and a pair of tennis shoes. They don't provide tennis shoes. But now I'm finding out they won't receive nothing."

I asked Rojas why he thought this was happening: "I've seen the rise of hatred towards our ethnic group. We see it happens with the Germans to the Jews, with other people, when the economy goes bad you got to blame somebody. There's the feeling that this ethnic group is causing a lot of problems."

ACLU Sues DHS and Others for "Deportation" of Pedro/Peter Guzman

The ACLU complaint on behalf of Peter Guzman filed on February 27, 2008 provides the first clear statement of the activities leading to what the ACLU calls Guzman's "illegal deportation," but might be better viewed as plain and simple criminal kidnapping. What else to call an organized effort to remove someone from the state without their consent? According to the complaint, Guzman was delusional part of the time in custody. Before this occurred and Guzman gave information on his birthplace, the Sheriff's Department correctly recorded this as California.

The complaint provides the first detailed narrative of the U.S. government's failure to obtain Guzman's consent before putting him on a bus on May 11, 2007, without his wallet or California driver's license, and dropping him off in Tijuana, where he knew no one.

Based on the details of this document I am further convinced that the ACLU is being too easy on the government. An "illegal deportation" is an oxymoron, as is the much more common violation of the "illegal arrest." Both of these weight the intentions of state actors in a manner law does not afford private individuals. The actions associated with the "illegal arrest" and even more so for an "illegal deportation" are indistinguishable from kidnapping, which really is the crime (and not just civil claim) that the government should be charging Chertoff et al. with committing. (For an explanation of why Guzman's forcible removal against his will from the USA meets the criteria of kidnapping, read this posting, based on the initial habeas complaint.)

If the state is acting against the law then the putative purpose claimed as the motive for that behavior, i.e., executing the law, is not relevant to defining the state's actions. If a law is not executed lawfully then these actions are not furthering the execution of the law and should be assessed on their own merits.

If I am trying to feed my family and steal food to accomplish that, I am not charged with "illegal caregiving," but theft. If I am unable to accomplish my benign purpose of assisting Mexicans excluded from the U.S. and I drive them into the USA, I am not charged with "illegal job support" but human trafficking.

In other words, state actors should be held accountable for the egregious actions that it commits against people in violation of all of the laws. When a failed execution of a law occurs, then the actions done on its behalf should receive no special protections because they were done by state actors. Indeed, if anything, the scrutiny and punishment of these illegal actions should be much more severe than that directed against private individuals, precisely because of the power these people wield.

"Caramel" Opens Tonight

"Caramel" was written by and stars the director, Nadine Labaki. It is the Lebanese submission to the Academy Awards for Best Foreign Film and screened at Cannes.

Labaki hews closely to the advice "write what you know." The film is set in a Beirut beauty parlor in a Christian neighborhood and is based on people Nadine observed. Most of the cast are non-actors, though you'd never know.

"Caramel" has received terrific reviews, including analogies to Pedro Almodovar's work. I've been telling my friends it's like "Sex in the City" set in Beirut. It's a subtle and humorous exploration of the friendship and challenges faced by an intergenerational group of women. There is a great range of characters, from a crazy old lady who collects traffic citations from windshields to the butch lesbian who fixes the generator and washes hair, and develops a simmering relationship with one of the clients.

Labaki is an accomplished actress and music video director whose work is widely admired in the Middle East. Over drinks after the screening a Palestinian filmmaker told Nadine that his mother in Nazareth was a huge fan and that if Nadine came to their city the whole town would come to a stop.

Nadine smiled and then looked sad. Because of her citizenship, Israel and Lebanon both make such a visit impossible.

If you want to support its wider release, and have a great evening, go see "Caramel" this weekend.

Wendy Brown's Talk: Neoliberalism, Neoconservatism, and the Nation-State

Yesterday I had the opportunity to join colleagues at UCLA's Mellon Workshop "Cultures in Transnational Perspective" and hear Wendy Brown discuss two recent essays she wrote: “Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy” and “American Nightmare: Neoliberalism, Neoconservatism, and De-democratization”. Wendy's always been one of my favorite lecturers. I especially appreciate her efforts in grappling with the academic and political Zeitgeists of the moment, and to respect her readers and listeners enough to give them nuanced readings and acknowledge her audience's possible objections to her analyses. If it's a parry with her own communities of "Women's Studies" or "the Left" Wendy's comments tend to provoke, sometimes with the point of provocation and that's also for the good.

Brown's Argument
In these particular essays, Brown defines "neoliberalism" and explores its differences and historical overlaps with "neoconservativism." She proposes that the neoliberalism of today -- its exact moment of origin is not stated -- is different from earlier expressions of neoliberalism. The distinctly horrible effects of neoliberalism today is its absorption of the entire government, so that a market rationality pervades all decision-making, and citizens come to understand themselves as consumers and lose sight of democracy's less instrumental possibilities.

Brown identifies herself as a Marxist and with radical critiques of politics, but things today are bad enough that she calls for a return to old fashioned "classical liberalism." Basic values such as rights, equality, and the rule of law that Marxists ridiculed turn out to have some value in themselves and are crucial if democracy is to be re-established.

Discussion
During the discussion Brown was asked a number of questions that seemed to press her to go further in the analytic distinctions she was making. Among these were 1) whether she was nostalgic for an era that perhaps never existed and, 2) whether she was sufficiently attentive to the meanings of "democracy."

As UCLA political theorist Juliet Williams pointed out in her comment (and in her terrific book Liberalism and the Limits of Power), a version of democracy is alive and well in popular culture. Top-rated shows such as "American Idol" and "America's Top Model" suggest Americans love to vote. What are the examples from U.S. American political history or from Brown's thought experiments that might instruct us on more desirable expressions of democracy? Brown replied this was a good question and said she might think further about how she was defining democracy.

Brown responded to questions on whether she was sufficiently attentive to the long history of U.S. politics that has been profoundly antiliberal, antiegalitarian, and unconcerned with the rule of law – slavery, prohiting women from voting, Manifest Destiny, the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War, Jim Crow, dropping the atom bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, assassinating leaders that threatened corporate interests abroad, etc. etc. etc.-- by agreeing, as she did in her essays, that the history of liberal democracy in the USA has been a troubled one.

I followed up by asking why, recognizing the family resemblance between earlier episodes violating liberal democratic ideals and those today, she chose to emphasize the differences and not the similarities. If generations of people who earlier expressed outrage over the events listed above could not push their government toward liberal democracy, why do we think we can do this?

Brown made the reasonable point that things today are different, and therefore she is calling for us to challenge the particularities of neoliberalism's current constellations to overthrow these now. A fair enough point, but it raises the question of criteria for deciding on what counts as “different enough” to justify this special attention to today's crises.

If it turns out that the violation of the rule of law in invading Iraq, for instance, has a lot in common with the violation of the rule of law in the Spanish-American War, when the United States seized Cuba, Puerto Rico and Guam from Spain, then it seems politically urgent to question not only the broader institutional contours of government that make possible repeated violations of liberal democratic norms but to ask whether “liberal democracy” is a possibility for the United States or any country that doesn't live near ice floes.

Bringing Back in the Nation
Instead of a relatively recent tension between competing ideologies of neoliberalism and neoconservatism, which Brown maps out quite convincingly, is it possible that Hegel was right, and that market rationality and norms of a moral authoritarianism can happily coexist as the means of institutionalizing the particularities of the nation-state? If this is right, then the current phenomena Brown describes are merely the most recent examples of a citizenry that is happy to exist as citizens who are consumers and, if not democrats, then joined to the state as nationalists. Their membership is consequential not because they vote or because America stands for particular ideals, but because America is America, their America. This is Mike Rogin's argument in his essays on demonology, that it is U.S. nationalism and anti-Russianism that fuels the anti-communism, and not vice-versa.

Hegel himself believed that the social contract theories of individual rights were a joke and impossible. A country that expects its members to die for it – in other words, any political society based on birth—is not going to guarantee individual rights for the sake of the individual, and the same goes for democratic rights. As long as the nation is the source of people's identities and political commitments, liberal democracy may be not just an illogical theory, as Hegel believed, but also an impossible political goal.

(By the way, the url in the screenshot above is from the United States Postal Service, and is the redirect if you type in www.usps.gov, which is supposed to be the url for any government agency. Try typing in usps.gov and see what happens. The USPS is run by Congress and the .com in its url has always bugged me. I wrote a note on the complaint box a few weeks ago but no one replied. In the event, the desire of a government agency to represent itself as a private firm is one of many examples of the neoliberalism ethos Brown is describing.)

Google Explains Jew Results

Google has replied to the petition to remove JewWatch.com from its search engine. No surprise that they won't remove the site, but their reply is more than a standard form letter and offers some interesting, though not entirely persuasive thoughts, on why anti-Semitic results appear.

f you recently used Google to search for the word "Jew," you may have seen results that were very disturbing. We assure you that the views expressed by the sites in your results are not in any way endorsed by Google. We'd like to explain why you're seeing these results when you conduct this search.

A site's ranking in Google's search results relies heavily on computer algorithms using thousands of factors to calculate a page's relevance to a given query. Sometimes subtleties of language cause anomalies to appear that cannot be predicted. A search for "Jew" brings up one such unexpected result.

If you use Google to search for "Judaism," "Jewish" or "Jewish people," the results are informative and relevant. So why is a search for "Jew" different? One reason is that the word "Jew" is often used in an anti-Semitic context. Jewish organizations are more likely to use the word "Jewish" when talking about members of their faith. The word has become somewhat charged linguistically, as noted on websites devoted to Jewish topics such as these:

* http://shakti.trincoll.edu/~mendele/vol01/vol01.174
* http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/jonah081500.asp

Someone searching for information on Jewish people would be more likely to enter terms like "Judaism," "Jewish people," or "Jews" than the single word "Jew." In fact, prior to this incident, the word "Jew" only appeared about once in every 10 million search queries. Now it's likely that the great majority of searches on Google for "Jew" are by people who have heard about this issue and want to see the results for themselves.

The beliefs and preferences of those who work at Google, as well as the opinions of the general public, do not determine or impact our search results. Individual citizens and public interest groups do periodically urge us to remove particular links or otherwise adjust search results. Although Google reserves the right to address such requests individually, Google views the comprehensiveness of our search results as an extremely important priority. Accordingly, we do not remove a page from our search results simply because its content is unpopular or because we receive complaints concerning it. We will, however, remove pages from our results if we believe the page (or its site) violates our Webmaster Guidelines, if we believe we are required to do so by law, or at the request of the webmaster who is responsible for the page.

We apologize for the upsetting nature of the experience you had using Google and appreciate your taking the time to inform us about it.

Sincerely,
The Google Team

I applaud Google's interest in ordinary language philosophy, i.e., the different motives for the use of "Jew" as distinct from "Jewish" or "Judaism." However suggestive their hypotheses, they are not entirely satisfying. First, most of the sites that appear when people use "Jew" are not "disturbing," including what is now the second-ranked site, the Wikipedia entry, which used to be first until this controversy appeared to bump up the JewWatch.com ranking to #1. Also, Google makes an uncharacteristically inaccurate statement about its own search engine: if you type in "Jews" and not "Jew," JewWatch.com also appears as the second site on the list (after the Wikipedia entry) and the third url on the list is for Jews for Jesus. And finally, as I pointed out yesterday, the explanation does not explain why similar results do not show up when people enter "Christian" or "Muslim."

While the details of Google's response are not entirely accurate, the spirit of its engagement is a welcome change from corporate double-speak that ignores the substantive issues. Their engagement, if not expertise in linguistics and counting (the results in their own search engine), are much appreciated.

Website Banning Petition in Progress

A few hours ago my girlfriend received a note forwarded from her mother's friend, asking her to sign a petition to remove "JewWatch.com" from the Google search engine. The note tells people, correctly, that JewWatch.com comes up very high on the google.com search engine if you type "jew." It was the second entry, after the Wikipedia entry. (A website has a high ranking on the google pages if a lot of people visit it through the google keyword searches or if a lot of other sites link to it, which the google engine can figure out by crawling through the web and finding the urls on other pages.)

The message says the site is anti-Semitic and tells recipients that if 500,000 people sign a petition requesting its removal from the search engine, Google will oblige. (The petition itself states Google will do this with a mere 50,000 signatures.)

I find it hard to believe that Google will in fact remove a site from its search regardless of the number of people who request this. If it does, this is a well-kept secret in the normally transparent Google operation, as its not mentioned in any of the means for removing site content. Hard to prove a negative, so I have a query into the Google Press Center about this.

The emailed message does raise an interesting question, and it's not about whether google should remove the site. (Of course not. That's a no-brainer for anyone who doesn't want their viewing habits controlled by the preferences of 50,000 or 500,000 people with too much time on their hands, though not enough time to realize that their messages are going to send people to the JewWatch.com site and further bolster its ranking.)

The intriguing question is why would JewWatch.com be the second site listed when "jew" is entered? Moreover, what does it mean that other entries on the first google page for "jew" are actually much more pernicious than JewWatch, including "The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem," a 1920 anti-Semitic screed by Henry Ford, the founder of the Ford car company. That site also includes links to the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" and other creepy sites.

I tried typing in "Christian," "Muslim" to see if something similar occurred, but it didn't. One reason is probably that Christians comprise 33% of the world's population and about 20% are Muslim. Jews are fewer than one half of one per cent of the world's population. Assuming that people who are members of a group are more favorably disposed to that group than those who are not, chances are that in absolute numbers, a lot more people are not-Jews than not-Christian or not-Muslim. If ten percent of Jews are not favorably disposed to Muslims and Christians, that's about 138,000 potential anti-Muslim or anti-Muslim website viewers. If 10 percent of Muslims (120 million) and 10 percent of Christians (198 million) hate Jews, that's 318 million people, more than enough for a robust Google ranking.

The sites that appear if you type "jew" are not just anti-Zionist or "anti-Israel Lobby" sites, to use the less charged language of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. These are sites that denounce people as Jews, and not just those who favor Israel.

The obvious reason for the sites' popularity is that a ton of people fear and hate Jews. However this is not a reason but another question. Why? What's going on with the hypothetical ten percent driving these rankings, people markedly singling out Jews and not other minority groups for international approbation? While it's true that hatred is more likely toward a religion other than one's own, the first pages of Google hits for "Confucian" or "Zoroastrians"--religions with fewer adherents than Judaism--display no links to hate-filled websites.

I don't think the answer is the one that B'nai B'rith has in mind but rather, that it lies in Israel's own policies that conflate Jewishness with Israeliness and hence encourage those who oppose Israel to oppose Jews. When I was living in Istanbul and a Turkish sect supporting Al Qaeda blew up nearby synagogues in 2003 and killed 29 Jewish Turks while they were worshiping, Israel arrived to assist with the removal of corpses and the investigation. Much to the country's dismay, the bodies were buried with Israeli and not Turkish flags. Perhaps this was the decision of the families, or of the Turkish government to show their solidarity and appreciation of Israeli aid. But this decision to collapse dying for being Jewish with the celebration of Israel was not made by the folks running JewWatch or other anti-Semitic sites.

Indeed Israel puts itself forward as a Jewish state. It allows anyone who can prove Jewish descent to become a citizen and denies this to anyone not already in its borders, including those who have been removed by force. It is therefore not all that surprising that Jews and not just the Israel lobby would be held responsible for the crimes committed by and in the name of Israel. Indeed to do otherwise, which has been demanded of outsiders since Israel's founding, is to expect a high if not absurd level of sophistication. During World War Two the United States government interned its own citizens if they happened to be Japanese. If Franklin Delano Roosevelt, married to a great civil rights leader, could conflate nationality with ethnicity, then it seems unsurprising that folks with far less cosmopolitan aspirations would do the same.

This does not mean that FDR was correct in assessing the loyalty of his citizens. The confusion reflects that nationality creates ethnicity: Ireland makes possible "the Irish," Korea "the Koreans," and so forth. Before Judaism was Judaism, the Israelites were a nation, one that God told Abraham he would choose for covenant. (Jews were named such much later, by the Romans after the largest tribe in Judea.) Yes, anti-Semitism existed before the modern state of Israel. Long before that. But it did not exist before Israel the patrilineal nation of descent, the one following from the lineage of Abraham before becoming matrilineal after the destruction of the Second Temple. In both cases, belonging to the Jewish or Israeli nation is largely a matter of descent and kinship, just like all other nations, a mark of belonging and therefore of exclusion as well.

If Jews want to stop being targeted in the fight against Israel, then Israel needs to forsake its status as a Jewish nation, and join all other countries in opening their borders. The best way to make sure JewWatch goes away, is to remove the Muslim Watch at the Israeli borders.

Gene Therapy Kills

It's tempting to think that we could crack the secret to long life and cure all diseases. The lure is not only one to perfect health but a fantasy about the overall importance of our genes, our heredity, in contrast with the influences of this world on our well-being.
There is a fantasy that an individual secret identity tying one back to a select community of special ancestors is the true source of one's history, culturally as well as medically. The fantasy is deadly not only as a source of warfare but also as lure to poor medical research. The unfounded faith in genes as a cure-all for human disease diverts scarce government funding from proven public health solutions to alchemy-like pursuits, and for the individual patients involved in this research, the experiments can be deadly.

To give one example: asthma rates in the United States have increased 100% in the last 20 years. This cannot possibly be attributed to changes in our genes. And yet more resources are devoted to finding genetic than environmental causes of asthma. I have published a few articles on this, including one about the first gene therapy death in 1999 discussing the origins of the Human Genome Project in the Manhattan Project. There's also a critique of racialized genetic medicine's intellectual history I published in Social Text and a policy article advising on alternative approaches to health research comparing ethnic and racial groups.

Here's what the New York Times reported today about Jolee Mohr:

Jolee Mohr, who had a 5-year-old daughter, died on July 24 at the University of Chicago Medical Center, three weeks after trillions of genetically engineered viruses were injected into her right knee as a test of an experimental treatment for rheumatoid arthritis. The type of virus used as a gene carrier has widely been considered safe and is being used in 35 other trials.

Autopsy data presented at the committee meeting yesterday in Bethesda, Md., suggested that the main cause of death was a fungal infection, histoplasmosis, that had gone out of control, destroying her organs. Ms. Mohr also suffered from internal bleeding, with a pool of blood in her abdomen that was so large that it displaced her kidneys and other organs.

The Times buried this story on A20, in contrast with its front page coverage of "promising" developments in the field, thereby contributing to the mindset of someone like Ms. Mohr. Her widower says that she was betrayed by researchers, who should not have enrolled a largely healthy 36-year-old in their risky experiment. But the fault is also with the media who perpetrate genetic iconography. Who doesn't want to be in on the ground floor of the next exciting cure?

The Political Science of Love and Hate

That's the title of the paper I'm about to give at the American Political Science meetings in Chicago. Leaving for the airport shortly but if you're interested in my day job, here you go: "The Political Science of Love and Hate."