Denise Morris talks with Yasmin Nair about immigrants-rights rhetoric and how certain strategies meant to insulate them from stereotypes and "include" may shutter the actual situation of undocument workers. She argues that the "undocumented not afraid" movement started as a "vital, important and dynamic" movement that has been swallowed by mainstream immigration rights movements, which re-enforce good-immigrant/bad-immigrant narratives. She compares these struggles to those in the gay-rights movement struggle around equality. She also notes how the immigration rights movement moves immigration away from looking at immigration as a crisis around labor-issues to a more "affective" realm that personalizes the issues.
Yasmin Nair is a Chicago-based writer, academic, activist and commentator. Her work appears in various anthologies, including "Captive Genders: trans-embodiment and the prison-industrial complex", "Windy City Queer: LGBTQ dispatches from the third coast", and "Arab Studies Quarterly". She's also a member of the editorial collective Against Equality.
- KBOO