This is why coming out of the shadows is an important part of the immigrant rights movement; to come out as illegalized is to question the very terms of your ongoing illegalization.
Think of other axes of oppression: Trans people are illegalized, women are illegalized, Black people are illegalized, non-binary people are illegalized, First Nations people are illegalized the list goes on.
Illegalization is an epistemic process because illegalized persons are not seen as people capable of knowledge.
From such an analysis, illegalized immigrants become not only alien as a matter of phenotype; they become alien as a matter of understanding — citizenship is impossible for illegal aliens because they do not operate in the same cognitive, moral, or political space as citizens do.
As a solution, I would argue that if immigrant rights advocates become aware of the epistemic nature of illegalization, organizations should be unequivocally committed to prioritizing how illegalized people both make sense of their experience and solving the issues illegalized people have in articulating their experience.
In an interview, she described how her illegal status affected her life: Tabea: "The situation [being illegalized] affects me, it even affects my health!
Thus, using the "illegalized" facilitates the global nature of the contemporary crisis of noncitizenship.
Being illegalized is the product of a historical, social, and epistemic process, and noncitizens find themselves at one point of a continuum.
But under humanitarian governance, this battle becomes an operation in which the illegalized body is both a security threat and a life to be secured.
Nevertheless, I feel safe in contending that a common language among illegalized people is important for a sustainable movement toward justice that exposes, yet is not bound by, the very borders which have determined humanity for much too long.
