ICE, Eugenics, Nazism, Biopower, Biopolitics, and Foucault...Oh My!

     Inda's article "Biopower, Reproduction, and the Migrant Woman's Body" as well as Costantini's article "Undocumented Women Forced to Give Birth While Shackled And In Police Custody" both weave a tale of biopower and political extremism that borders on eugenic-level Nazism.  We have discussed at length in this course the sociopolitical airs surrounding the constructed discourses pertaining to the "immigrant," the "alien," the "illegal," the "border," and the underlying yet overarching concept of "othering" that permeates all of the above.
     Using Foucault's writings on "biopower" and its effects on biopolitics and the social body, one can certainly see the connections between Inda's article, Costantini's article, and his (Foucault's) underlying message that biopower, this innate ability to regulate the social and biological reproduction of a population, in order to maintain a "healthy and vigorous population" parlays into a biopolitics regime that centers itself on "the necessity of establishing a threshold in life that distinguishes what is inside from what is outside, separating those bodily interests that can be represented in the polity fro those which cannot, from those adverse to the social order it embodies" (Inde 99,102).
     Costantini's harrowing tale of women being shackled to a hospital bed during what can be, and usually is, one of the most painstaking endeavors of their lives, childbirth, brings forth mental images of eugenics laboratories, science experiments of a Frankensteinian nature, and ultimately draconian politics, that all have a basis in this underlying ideology, which, again, we have discussed at length throughout this course, particularly in Kaplan's and Chavez's work, regarding the American-generated discourse that these "illegal immigrants" are incapable of "mixing" within the homogenous and "elitist" society that is apparently so sacred to protect, that one must risk the numerous lives of the "Other" for the sake of protecting it, thus fully embodying Foucault's treatise on the merging of sovereign power and biopower.  Unfortunately, the consequence of this merging is the disruption, exploitation, and utter inhumane abuse of human lives.  Lives that are merely being lived in the pursuit of something better, of something more than what they know.
     Foucault's reference to the Nazi state (102-103 Inda) really made a lot of sense from a eugenics/American exceptionalism standpoint, in that, through this "othering" on a reproductive level, there is a deeper and further "othering" at play that not only plays at the "illegal" status of the mother, but at the transgressive nature of the child being born, for that child has merged the citizen, the illegal, the state, and the border, into one disturbing experience, mirroring a Nazi eugenics laborator of yore, often regulated at the hands of the United States Border Patrol, with their ultimate aim of "protecting the social body" (Chavez 72; Inda 102-3).
     In a sentiment mirrored by a classmate, if these are the lengths to which we, as a collective polity, are willing to traverse, in the name of "purifying" our "social body" then, please, by all means, let's colorify America.  A rainbow of individuals, from a rainbow of perspectives, with a rainbow of experiences, with the potential to share those experiences, resulting in lessons to be learned by all.