immigration/citizenship

Ryan sent in a story about the video game Border Patrol, in which you try to keep three types of Mexicans from crossing the border: drug dealers, Mexican nationalists, and “breeders,” who are of course pregnant women on their way to the welfare office:

According to Kotaku,  a city representative in Georgia emailed it to colleagues with the following note:

THIS IS WAY TOO MUCH FUN!!!!!!!!!!!! Makes you feel better anyway, I did my part today, I kept a few from coming over!!! GET READY —- THEY ARE FAAAST! ! !

Classy.

And the Star of David on the American flag is a nice touch.

NOTE: A number of commenters have made various suggestions about what the Star of David might mean–support for Israel, a conflation of Jewish and Christian values as “American,” etc. I don’t know for sure, but my best guess is that it’s an added little bit of racism. If a few of my relatives are any indication, anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic sentiments often seem to go well together. One of my relatives who is virulently anti-immigrant also once gave my mom a video to watch and when she turned it on she realized it was this anti-Semitic thing about how Jews are trying to institute a New World Order. So I tend to think it’s supposed to indicate, as one commenter said, that the U.S. has been weakened and taken over by ineffectual liberalized Jews who are letting all the immigrants in as part of their master plan to….well, I don’t really know what the master plan is. I will see if I can find out when I visit my family members and let you know so we can all prepare. Or, for our Jewish readers, take part, I guess. Oh, wait, duh. Our Jewish readers already know. I forgot. One of my long-lost relatives from Arkansas explained to my mom how Jews communicate through all the symbols on packaging (you know, like TM, (R), and so on) to spread instructions for…well, again, since I don’t know the Mysterious Master Plan, I don’t know what the instructions are about. My poor mother has asked me on multiple occasions why people seem to think she’d want to hear bad things about Jewish people. My mother has her faults, but anti-Semitism isn’t one of them, so I’m going to have to chalk it up to the bad luck of being related to a lot of crazy racist people.

Anyway, that was my rambling way of saying I don’t think the Star of David on the flag is a pro-Israel thing.

NEW! (Oct. ’09) Katie J. sent us a link to the video game El Emigrante, in which you (in sombrero) ride a bike and try to avoid the police after you jump the border wall:

The documentary, Hearts Suspended, points to one way that immigration policy disadvantages women.  When a non-U.S. citizen is granted the permission to live and work in the U.S., their spouses are often given permission to accompany their spouse, but not to work.  These spouses, wives more often than husbands, find themselves completely dependent on their husbands.

[youtube]https://youtu.be/Nj34k6fLpf4[/youtube]

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

The controversial Minuteman Project encourages citizens to volunteer their time guarding the U.S./Mexico border against illegal immigration.  Well, if you are disinclined to wander the border desert, you can now be a virtual Minuteman.  Sandra H. N. sent us a link to BlueServo where you can click on a series of webcams.  Each webcam is pointed at a spot where there may be illegal border crossings.  Here’s a screenshot of the webcams you can select from:

Here’s a video about the project:

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCxXlPrxV7c[/youtube]

Here’s a description of a virtual border guard from an NPR story:

[He] pops a Red Bull, turns on some Black Sabbath or Steppenwolf, logs in to www.blueservo.net — and starts protecting his country. “This gives me a little edge feeling,” Fahrenkamp says, “like I’m doing something for law enforcement as well as for our own country.”

This is a fascinating convergence of patriotism, masculinity, class, and (likely) race.   Minutemen protect (white) America by putting their bodies on the border, but now men can do so without the trappings of masculinity that Minutemen can lay claim to.  Instead, if they have a computer with a (quick)  internet connection, they can defend America from behind a computer screen and, perhaps, lay claim to at least some of the masculine capital that Minutemen on the border earn by putting their bodies on the line.

From another angle:  I wish Foucault were alive today.  Any Foucauldians out there who want to comment on this virtual panopticon?

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Brady sent me a link to a story in the Times Online about a poster put out by the British National Party, a right-wing anti-immigrant political party. Here’s the poster (found at the BNP website):

They’re clearly trying to connect efforts to defend Britain during World War II to the idea of a modern “battle for Britain,” which this time is against immigrants. However, they missed a detail when the chose the image for their poster, according to the Times story:

[The plane] could be clearly identified by its RF marking as belonging to 303 Squadron, an expatriate Polish unit, even though the BNP campaigns against immigration from Eastern Europe.

The BNP claims they knew it all along and did it on purpose; others believe they’re just trying to cover an incident that they find embarrassing.

Regardless, it brings up interesting questions about nationhood and definitions of who can be included in a country’s idea of its history. In the imagining of the BNP, would immigrants’ contributions be erased? Would they be acknowledged, but only as something that was appropriate and welcome in the past? After all, one of the very groups they’re vilifying played a role in defending Britain during the exact era that the BNP is trying to symbolically connect itself to. I suspect they might try to make an argument that the ex-pat Polish fighters were involuntary and temporary refugees that were being protected by Britain during a time of warfare and were in fact fighting to retake their own country, which is different than permanent immigrants who take British jobs and mess up the culture and whatnot, but that’s just a guess.

Of course, this isn’t something unique to the BNP; nativist groups everywhere face the problem of having to erase or explain away the contributions of groups they’re trying to exclude from citizenship.

Thanks for the tip, Brady!

In Race, Ethnicity, and Sexuality, Joane Nagel talks about the role that the intersections between ethnicity and sexuality play in nationalist projects–that is, how they are used as groups define who is and isn’t part of the entity defined as “the nation.” Those who are part of the nation are part of “us,” and those outside it are the Other. She brings up the example of Nazi Germany. Clearly ethnicity played a huge part in definitions of nationhood as the Nazis saw it. But as Nagel points out, it went beyond that; individuals were also included or excluded from membership based on other characteristics, including sexuality. Specifically, homosexuals were marked as unworthy of inclusion and were also sent to concentration camps.

This image, found at The Pink Triangle, illustrates the intersection ethnicity and various categories, including sexuality. It shows the various markers Nazis used to identify prisoners.

The bottom row of seven triangles clearly represents different categories of Jews. The fifth column of triangles (they look tan but they were pink) identified homosexuals. The third column (blue) was for immigrants. I believe the first column (red) was for political dissenters, but I’m not certain. We see other specified groups of Jews in the three partly-yellow triangles at the bottom, as well as triangles for Poles and Czechs. I don’t know enough German to figure the others out.

It’s a great example of a nationalist project: we can visibly see here the clear effort to define some groups as Others and the way that both ethnicity and sexuality (and the intersections) can be an important part of that, and even mark individuals as multiply stigmatized.

UPDATE: In comments philoserine and xac offered translations. Here’s xac’s:

[Columns]
red: political
green: professional criminal
blue: emigrant
purple: Jehovah’s Witnesses
pink: homosexual
black: work-shy Reich (not 100% sure wether the meaning here is “rich” or “member of the Third Reich” – more likely the last one though)
black: work-shy
[I thought I read somewhere that black might stand for antisocial, so maybe work-shy was how they defined that?]
[Rows]
1. row (triangles) base colour
2. row: label for reoffenders
3. row: penal camp
4. row: jews
5. row:
yellow triangle/black bordered triangle: jewish race desecrator
red circle with white border: under suspicion to escape
grey ring: ?? prisoner
6. row: left: Example: political jew, reoffender, penal camp
middle: special campaign Wehrmacht (?)
7. row: Pole
Czech

Thanks!

And Zeitzeuge says that “Special campaign Wehrmacht is a deserter from the Wehrmacht.”

In agriculture, monoculture is the practice of relying extensively on one crop with little biodiversity.  In the 1840s, a famine in Ireland was caused by a disease that hit potatoes, the crop on which Irish people largely relied.  At Understanding Evolution, an article reads:

The Irish potato clones were certainly low on genetic variation, so when the environment changed and a potato disease swept through the country in the 1840s, the potatoes (and the people who depended upon them) were devastated.

The article includes this illustration of how monocultures are vulnerable:

The Irish potato famine reveals how choices about how to feed populations, combined with biological realities, can have dramatic impacts on the world.  In the three years that the famine lasted, one out of every eight Irish people died of starvation.  Nearly a million emigrated to the United States, only to face poverty and discrimination, in part because of their large numbers.

The article continues:

Despite the warnings of evolution and history, much agriculture continues to depend on genetically uniform crops. The widespread planting of a single corn variety contributed to the loss of over a billion dollars worth of corn in 1970, when the U.S. crop was overwhelmed by a fungus. And in the 1980s, dependence upon a single type of grapevine root forced California grape growers to replant approximately two million acres of vines when a new race of the pest insect, grape phylloxera (Daktulosphaira vitifoliae, shown at right) attacked in the 1980s.

Gwen adds: The Irish potato famine is also an example of a reality about famines that we rarely discuss. In most famines there is food available in the country, but the government or local elites do not believe that those who are starving have any claim to that food. In the years of the Irish potato famine, British landowners continued to export wheat out of Ireland. The wheat crop wasn’t affected by the potato blight. But wheat was a commercial crop the British grew for profit. Potatoes were for Irish peasants to eat. We might think it would be obvious that when people are starving you’d make other food sources available to them, but that’s not what happened. In the social hierarchy of the time, many British elites didn’t believe that starving Irish people had a claim to their cash crop, and so they continued to ship wheat out of the country to other nations even while millions were dying or emigrating. Similarly, in the Ethiopian famines of the 1980s, the country wasn’t devoid of food; it’s just that poor rural people weren’t seen as having a right to food, and so available food was not redistributed to them. Many people in the country ate just fine while their fellow citizens starved.

So famine is often as much about politics and social hierarchies as it is about biology.

Inspired by a recent post about a T-shirt where an Asian stereotype was saying I SPEAK ENGRISH, I thought of the perennial online popularity of “Engrish” in general. Engrish.com, one of the oldest such compendia on the Web, offers a selection of photos from clothing, packaging, menus, signs, etc., largely from Asian companies. All of these photos have been collected for their supposed humor value because they contain text poorly translated into English, English text that seems incongruous with whatever it’s describing, and/or place names that sound taboo in English. Examples below the cut [some taken from the Adult Engrish section and thus possibly NSFW].  more...

Immigration and migration are a modern-reality of global social transformation. I don’t often see as much discussion of refugees however. A nice infographic via Good Magazine.