Mexican migration to the US is distinguished by a seeming paradox that is seldom examined: while no other country has supplied nearly as many migrants to the US as Mexico has since 1965, virtually all major changes in US immigration law during this period have created ever more severe restrictions on the conditions of “legal” migration from Mexico. Indeed, this seeming paradox presents itself in a double sense: on the one hand, apparently liberalizing immigration laws have in fact concealed their significantly restrictive features, especially for Mexicans; on the other hand, ostensibly restrictive immigration laws intended to deter migration have nonetheless been instrumental in sustaining Mexican migration, but only by significantly restructuring migrants’ legal status as “undocumented.” Beginning in the 1960s— precisely when Mexican migration escalated dramatically—and ever since, persistent revisions in the law have made it virtually impossible for the great majority who would migrate from Mexico to do so in accord with the law and have thus played an instrumental role in the production of a legally vulnerable, undocumented workforce of “illegal aliens.”

The Legal Production of Mexican/Migrant “Illegality”

This essay argues that Guantanamo lies at the heart of the American Empire. The legal status of the prisoners there must be understood in the context of an imperial history that dates back to the U.S. occupation of Cuba in 1898. This history explains how the U.S. Naval Station, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has become an ambiguous space, both inside and outside national and juridical borders and how this ambiguity reinforces the harsh penal regime. The essay argues that the legacies of U.S. imperialism inform key contemporary debates about Guantanamo: the question of national sovereignty, the codification of the prisoners as "enemy combatants," and the uncertainty about whether the U.S. Constitution holds sway there. Turning to the 2004 Supreme Court decision, Rasul v. Bush, the essay argues that the justices are not only interested in restraining executive power to bring Guantanamo within the rule of domestic law; they also show concern with the scope of U.S. power in the world and the extent to which the judiciary should accompany or limit U.S. military rule abroad. A close reading of the Supreme Court's decision and dissent shows that the logic and rhetoric of Rasul v. Bush rely on and perpetuate the imperial history the decision also elides. In concert other recent decisions about civil liberties and national security, Rasul v. Bush contributes to the global expansion of U.S. power by reworking the earlier history of imperial rule. The Court's legal decisions respond to the changing demands of empire today by creating new categories of persons before the law that extend far beyond Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Where Is Guantanamo

Patterns of Empire comprehensively examines the two most powerful empires in modern history: the United States and Britain. Challenging the popular theory that the American empire is unique, Patterns of Empire shows how the policies, practices, forms and historical dynamics of the American empire repeat those of the British, leading up to the present climate of economic decline, treacherous intervention in the Middle East and overextended imperial confidence. A critical exercise in revisionist history and comparative social science, this book also offers a challenging theory of empire that recognizes the agency of non-Western peoples, the impact of global fields and the limits of imperial power.

Patterns of Empire: The British and American Empires, 1688 to the Present

This article develops a global fields approach for conceptualizing the global arena. The approach builds upon existing approaches to the world system and world society while articulating them with the field theory of Bourdieu and organizational sociology. It highlights particular structural configurations (“spaces of relations”) and the specific cultural content (“rules of the game” and “symbolic capital”) of global systems. The utility of the approach is demonstrated through an analysis of the different forms of the two hegemonic empires of the past centuries, Great Britain and the United States. The British state tended toward formal imperialism in the 19th century, characterized by direct territorial rule, while the United States since WWII has tended toward informal imperialism. The essay shows that the difference can be best explained by considering the different historical global fields in which the two empires operated.

Global Fields and Imperial Forms: Field Theory and the British and American Empires*

This book investigates the construction of social reality in the relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico over the past 100 years.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/3805293.pdf

The Legal Construction of Identity: The Judicial and Social Legacy of American Colonialism in Puerto Rico

In this groundbreaking study of American imperialism, leading legal scholars address the problem of the U.S. territories. Foreign in a Domestic Sense will redefine the boundaries of constitutional scholarship.

More than four million U.S. citizens currently live in five “unincorporated” U.S. territories. The inhabitants of these vestiges of an American empire are denied full representation in Congress and cannot vote in presidential elections. Focusing on Puerto Rico, the largest and most populous of the territories, Foreign in a Domestic Sense sheds much-needed light on the United States’ unfinished colonial experiment and its legacy of racially rooted imperialism, while insisting on the centrality of these “marginal” regions in any serious treatment of American constitutional history. For one hundred years, Puerto Ricans have struggled to define their place in a nation that neither wants them nor wants to let them go. They are caught in a debate too politicized to yield meaningful answers. Meanwhile, doubts concerning the constitutionality of keeping colonies have languished on the margins of mainstream scholarship, overlooked by scholars outside the island and ignored by the nation at large.

This book does more than simply fill a glaring omission in the study of race, cultural identity, and the Constitution; it also makes a crucial contribution to the study of American federalism, serves as a foundation for substantive debate on Puerto Rico’s status, and meets an urgent need for dialogue on territorial status between the mainlandd and the territories.

Contributors. Jose Julian Alvarez Gonzalez, Roberto Aponte Toro, Christina Duffy Burnett, Jose A. Cabranes, Sanford Levinson, Burke Marshall, Gerald L. Neuman, Angel R. Oquendo, Juan Perea, Efren Rivera Ramos, Rogers M. Smith, E. Robert Statham Jr., Brook Thomas, Richard Thornburgh, Juan R. Torruella, Jose Trias Monge, Mark Tushnet, Mark Weiner

Burke Marshall

Papers

Foreign in a Domestic Sense: Puerto Rico, American Expansion, and the Constitution

Between the Foreign and the Domestic: The Doctrine of Territorial Incorporation, Invented and Reinvented