sovereignty, to paraphrase nazi jurist carl schmitt, is the ability to decide on who can be killed with impunity. excerpts from NNIR and Agamben below.
from NNIR:
"THOUSANDS REMEMBER DEAD IMMIGRANTS IN DAY OF DEAD CELEBRATIONS
Story Filed: Tuesday, November 02, 1999 7:39 PM EST
Calexico, California, Nov 02, 1999 (EFE via COMTEX) -- Various Hispanic groups in 18 U.S. cities, on the Day of the Dead, remembered by placing thousands of crosses the would-be immigrants who died trying to cross into the United States.
"With government (efforts) to seal the borders, immigrants are forced to cross through dangerous areas, where they face dehydration, attacks and even death," said the director of the National Network for the Defense of Immigrant-Refugee Rights, Cathi Tactaquin.
In the activist's opinion, U.S. Immigration and Nationalization Service (INS) efforts to seal the border have made crossing into the United States more dangerous and she called on politicians to stop "immigration strategies which result in the loss of human lives."
Tuesday's ceremonies, including wakes, marches and protests, were organized based on a University of Houston study which shows that INS policies have been responsible for some 300 immigrant deaths per year. Hundreds of wooden, white-painted crosses appeared this morning by the metal fence on the international border in Calexico, California, to remember illegal immigrants who died while trying to cross into the United States.
Each one of the 451 crosses placed in Calexico stands for an undocumented immigrant who has died in California trying to cross the border since the INS launched Operation Guardian in 1994 to stop them. Of the 451 illegal immigrants deaths in California, 212 were due to exposure in desert or mountains along the border, while another 111 drowned while trying to cross the canal along the border with Calexico. It was not specified how the remaining immigrants died. ... Copyright (c) 1999. Agencia EFE S.A."
from Agamben, _Homo Sacer_, pp.127-32
"A simple examamination of the text of the Declaration of 1789 shows that it is precisely bare natural life -- which is to say, the pure fact of birth -- that appears here as the source and bearer of right. 'Men,' the first article declares, 'are born and remain free and equal in rights' (from this perspective, the strictest formulation of all is to be found in La Fayette's project elaborated in July 1789: 'Every man is born with inalienable and indefeasible rights.') At the same time, however, the very natural life that, inaugurating the biopolitics of modernity, is placed at the foundation of the order vanishes into the figure of the citizen, in whom rights are 'preserved' (according to the second article: 'The goal of every political association is the preservation of the natural and indefeasible rights of man.'). And the Declaration can attribute sovereignty to the 'nation' (according to the third article: 'The principle of sovereignty resides essentially in the nation') precisely because it has already inscribed this element of birth in the very heart of the political community. The nation -- the term derives etymologically from _nascere_ (to be born) -- thus closes the open circle of man's birth.
Declaration of rights must therefore be viewed as the place in which the passage from divinely authorised royal sovereignty to national sovereignty is accomplished. This passage assures the _exceptio_ of life in the new state order that will succeed the collapse of the _ancien regime_. ...birth, which is to say, bare natural life as such -- here for the first time becomes ... the immediate bearer of sovereignty. The principle of nativity and the principle of sovereignty ... are now irrevocably united in the body of the 'sovereign subject' so that the foundation of the new nation-state may be constituted. ... The fiction implicit here is that _birth_ immediately becomes _nation_ such that there can be no interval of separation {scarto} between the two terms.
...When the hidden difference {scarto} between birth and nation entered into a lasting crisis following the devastation of Europe's geopolitical order after the First World War, what appeared was Nazism and fascism, that is, two properly biopolitical movements that made of natural life the exemplary place of the sovereign decision. ...
If refugees (whose number has continued to grow in our century, to the point of including a significant part of humanity today) represent such a disquieting element in the order of modern nation-states, this is above all because by breaking the continuity between man and citizen, nativity and nationality, they put the originary fiction of modern sovereignty in crisis. ...
...one of the few rules to which the Nazis constantly adhered during the course of the 'Final Solution' was that jews could be sent to the extermination camps only after they had been fully denationalized (stripped even of the residual citizenship left to them after the Nuremburg laws.). ..."
Angela