Emily Ruehs - Casualties of Care

I thoroughly enjoyed this book as it overlaps really well with the type of research that I am doing, and although I hadn’t read it before, I had tried to develop a similar theory around the idea of immigrant bodies in the past. I have moved away from these theories in recent months but this reading has made me reconsider using the idea of the body as a prerequisite for citizenship. Here I wrestle with some of the ways that the French contexts overlaps with or is different than the US context.

Ticktin’s research explores the idea that immigration can be managed through a discourse of care and compassion.  In order to explore this idea, she posits that “suffering” is an idea believed to be universal and it is recognized most often in the biological body (3). Yet how we recognize this suffering depends on different contexts (social, economic, etc). So, suffering in and of itself does not demand government response unless the sufferer is considered morally legitimate. My first thought in relationship to my research is that it is notable that in the US context, border control policy actually create more physical suffering. Several recent policy changes on the border have resulted in a militarized system of border control that hasn’t slowed immigration but pushed immigrants to more dangerous terrain. In fact, one article demonstrates that there was a direct correlation between the construction of the wall and the amount of immigrant falling injuries. Furthermore, several dehydration and heat related illness has increased So, US policy of border enforcement seems to be the opposite as there seems to be no concern to the physical suffering of immigrants at the border. I don’t think that this means that Ticktin’s theory doesn’t apply to the US situation; rather, we can look more at the idea of morally legitimate suffering. In the US, immigrants and refugees have very different relationships to the US government. Refugees in the US perhaps are the “casualties of care” that immigrants in France are. The US government still decides who is a refugee, who is granted amnesty, based on understanding of suffering. Immigrants from Latin America and Mexico are not granted refugee status, perhaps, because economic suffering is believed to be the primary motive for migration and is not considered legitimate. Or, perhaps because undocumented immigrants lack “innocence” (18); if crossing the border without documents is a crime, the innocence and thus moral legitimacy of the immigrant is in question.

Ticktin suggests that the sick immigrant body in France is given rights but only if that body remains sick. Yet, as she mentions, until 2010 HIV status was actually a reason for exclusion or deportation in the US; not, as in France, a claim to human rights. While HIV status is now an accepted category for amnesty requests, other types of illnesses still bar immigrants from entry (such as tuberculosis, syphilis and gonorrhea). It is interesting to me that several illnesses that are grounds for exclusions are sexually transmitted. Perhaps Tickten’s analysis of “morally legitimate suffering” (11) applies here, too. In the US, STDs remain outside of the “morally legitimate” realm of bodily diseases as they are associated with immorality.

Finally, Ticktin mentions the idea of the “heroic French doctor” who saves suffering immigrants. From what I’ve seen, this humanitarian language is often applied to border control agents to justify actions on the US border. Several ethnographers of human smuggling have theorized that when human smugglers are vilified, border control agents are seen as the heroes. Government investigators and human rights watch groups both report that coyotes take advantage of naïve immigrants, steal money, charge extortionary prices, abuse immigrants, and often abandon their groups in the middle of the desert. When border agents stumble across these “abandoned groups” (social scientist ethnographers question the legitimacy of this idea), they are seen as the rescuers.

My general methodological take away from this reading is that I might want to consider the importance of the body in immigration control. Whereas it seems obvious to look at the violent response to immigrants, this reading suggests that even a response of caring—particularly when it is not applied universally—might also be a lens with which to understand the politics of immigration.