Abstract
Ableism forms the scaffolding of our immigration laws, policies, and practices, but the operation of this pervasive form of exclusion has been grossly unacknowledged and understudied until now. In 1882, Congress first codified the exclusion of defective bodies by declaring that, “any lunatic, idiot, or any person unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge,” was unworthy of admission onto U.S. shores. These ability-based hierarchies remain in today’s immigration system which rewards productivity, educational attainment, and high-skilled labor with regularized immigration status, an array of public benefits, work authorization, and other advantages. We argue that immigration legal and policy frameworks must be reimagined in order to decouple the process of migration from this system of body valuation.
This Article is the first to argue that dismantling ableism must be a core imperative of the movement for immigration abolition, and that the principles of disability justice can serve as a tool for identifying the radical changes necessary to achieve this transformation.
We begin by interrogating abolitionist scholarship. We observe the limited acknowledgment of the role that ableism has played in erecting systems of oppression and the consequent absence of anti-ableist strategies to achieve a vision of abolition that eliminates the categorization and stratification of bodies. We then look more closely at the immigration system and the ways in which it creates categories of exclusion based on perceptions of worth and productivity. We also illuminate how ableism has fueled the erection of access barriers for disabled immigrants, and the resulting disempowerment of these individuals as they navigate complex immigration procedures. We contend that decoupling migration from ableism and advancing access as a pathway to power and self-determination for immigrant communities must become a part of the abolitionist vision. This approach encourages the exploration of new solutions drawn from the lessons of the disability rights and disability justice movements.
We then explore three specific ways in which ableism operates in the modern immigration system. We posit that ableism: (1) undergirds the construction of disabled immigrants as unworthy burdens; (2) robs disabled immigrants of agency and self-determination; and (3) invisibilizes the experiences of disabled immigrants navigating immigration processes and the advocacy ecosystem. We look to the ten principles of disability justice to propose transformative solutions to address these systemic problems. We argue that accounting for ableism as an intrinsic and formative component of the existing immigration system will augment existing eff orts to achieve change. We hope that this reframing is only the beginning for new lines of scholarly and empirical exploration. Our goal is to reimagine migration for disabled people, and, in turn, for all bodies that cross borders.
