In a world of rigidly inflicted borders, papers and documentation are tangible ways that governments confer citizenship and legal recognition. Dan-el Padilla Peralta, a Dominican-American author and professor of Classics at Princeton, and Joel Sati, PhD candidate in Jurisprudence and Social Policy at UC Berkeley and JD candidate at Yale Law School, explored these concepts at length during their conversation on “Citizenship, Illegalization, and Insularity” for the Radical Kinship series at the Center for Race and Gender. 

In the United States, the law is orchestrated in such a way that people can lapse into illegality, often through the government’s detainment or deportation of those who aspire to become citizens. Yet the very concept of illegality is a fabrication of the legal system — or, as Sati suggests, an influencing factor within the legal system. Indeed, the narrative of the “illegal alien” and the very rhetoric of “illegality” account for dynamic changes in immigration law. Immigrants are stripped of their human rights, branded first and foremost by their immigration status.Through this fabricated lack of status and the accompanying ostracization, the narrative and rhetorical aspects of the "illegal alien"account for dynamic ways in which immigration law has undergone changes and illegality has been cast and recast in the image of courts and legislation. 

Existing immigration narratives often attest to the impact of race, and Black immigrants in particular have had to contend with a social reality in which citizenship does not necessarily mean that the state will offer protection. “What does it mean to fight for papers if some people can get them and still be subject to state violence?” Sati asked. The immigration movement has focused primarily on the contrasting reception of Brown, Latin-American immigrants and that of white, European immigrants; meanwhile, the particular impact of Blackness on the experience of immigrants has often been overlooked. In order to extend the reach of immigration justice, Padilla and Sati suggest that antiracist practices must be brought into the immigration rights movement, and the inherent anti-Blackness entrenched in the history and structure of legal practice must be brought to the fore. 

The irony of legalization, Sati noted, is that in order to enforce borders, the immigration enforcement apparatus itself has to be borderless. In other words, organizations such as ICE, the military, and even local police forces have been given extrajudicial privileges to police and patrol migrant communities and their movement. The work of enforcing immigration law has extended beyond Immigration Customs and Enforcement: agencies that were not built to work with immigration, such as local police departments and bureaucratic apparatuses, are now responsible for locating, detaining, and arresting immigrants under the guise of national security, effectively sanctioning the criminalization of immigrants. The collaborative and often collusive spirit shared by Immigration Customs and Enforcement and local police departments generates an atmosphere of hostility and unbridled, institutionally sanctioned violence. 

In order to understand how legalization can help us think about immigration justice, the speakers suggested, we must first recognize migration as a human right. As Padilla noted, movement is a basic part of human existence and flourishing, and the right to migrate is at odds with the state’s right to control and solidify its borders and the violence that constitutes them. There is a moral importance to affirming migration and condemning the state for inflicting violence based on migration status. “When we think of migration, we should think of it as so fundamental to human existence it is as absurd as the right to breathe,” Padilla declared, emphasizing the notion that the instinct to move is so basic and essential that it should not even be brought into question.

Systemically ingrained threats against migration and existence in a state of illegality are disproportionately manifest in the risk that striving for citizenship invites. The systemic distribution of violence that bars individuals from so-called legal migration exposes those who seek the realization of citizenship to forms of risk that are “menaces to their wellbeing,” which can, in turn, compromise their opportunity for material and community-wide success. For Padilla, revolution is the answer to the minoritization and structural violence that measures of migratory control and patrol can inflict.

Such a revolution would require delegitimizing citizenship as the ultimate privilege, and instead reimagining it as a “stepping stone” to greater purposes and endeavors. Citizenship and documentation have proven to be constrictive and reductive in the sense that they do not account for the natural human instinct to move freely. Rather than asking for institutions of the state to recognize immigrants’ rights as an end goal, such a reimagining would do away with limits on the immigration rights movement altogether. Sati proposes that abolition of ICE, the carceral state, capitalist policy, and systematized containment is a more productive pursuit for fundamentally reenvisioning what constitutes the state, and by extension, the global community — that is, “to be as borderless as the world we want to create,” as Sati put it. 

For Padilla, the ideal of a borderless society is, in the end, incompatible with the nation-state. The nation-state, he explained, relies on borders not only to control movement but also to confer rights, as evidenced by the differentiated status of citizens. While the documentation conferred by the nation-state on citizens is supposedly designed to offer a tangible alternative to illegality, in practice it only highlights the way that citizenship reaffirms that some people are treated as illegal regardless of their legal status or documentation. Papers are rapidly losing their relevance to the conversation around immigrants’, and even citizens, rights. 

As the Radical Kinship series moderator, Alán Pelaez Lopez,  suggested in their conclusion to the conversation: for people of color, documentation will always be at odds with the inability to coexist within the subconscious association of citizenry and whiteness. As long as the state continues to uphold and reinforce apparatuses of control and regulation deriving from policies like the Fugitive Slave Act and the Bracero Program, which are blatant examples of institutional discrimination and devaluation of Black and Brown inhabitants of the United States, immigration and citzenship laws will never be fair or just. Acquiescence and fruitless attempts to reform this soulless institution are not sustainable solutions to dismantling the discriminatory logics that are entrenched in the foundations of the immigration system; abolition is.