To Make Live and Let Die: How Our Immigration System Treats Migrants’ Lives as Expendable

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Depending on who you are, your emotional response to talking about death and the migration system ranges somewhere between uncomfortable to re-traumatizing. If you belong somewhere on the “uncomfortable” side of the spectrum, I believe we have a responsibility to make ourselves uncomfortable by actively analyzing and engaging with the ways in which our lives are ethically bound up with the suffering of others. If you belong somewhere closer to the “re-traumatizing” end of the spectrum, this may not be the post for you.

The idea of expendability is captured in one of the French philosopher Michel Foucault’s most influential concepts: “biopolitics.” At its most basic, Foucault describes biopolitics as the way in which life, mainly social life in the aggregate, has become a domain of the exercise of political power in the modern era. Think about the ways in which life-giving forms of welfare, medical care, housing, and exposure to environmental poisons are fought over as political issues.

More importantly, I think by now it is (relatively) common knowledge that race plays a powerful, sometimes determinate, role in…