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Commentary: Organizing Tensions-From the Prison to the Military-Industrial Complex

IN AUGUST 2001, THE DEVELOPMENT RELIEF AND EDUCATION FOR ALIEN MINORS ACT (DREAM Act), a proposal to assist select undocumented students in attaining legal status, was introduced into the 107th Congress by Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah. This bill has never received enough votes to pass; in 2003, 2005, 2007, and most recently in March 2009, modified versions of the bill were reintroduced. Although garnering more support each time, these versions failed to pass. (1) The 2009 version introduced by Senators Richard Durbin (D-IL) and Richard Lugar (R-IN) offered youth between the ages of 12 and 35 the possibility of legalization if they had arrived in the United States before the age of 16, lived here for five years, graduated from a U.S. high school or obtained a GED, and demonstrated "good moral character." Those meeting these criteria would receive temporary residency for six years; permanent residence (with no conditions) within the six years would be granted to students who earned at least a two-year degree, completed at least two years of a Bachelor's degree, or served two years in the U.S. military and received an honorable discharge. Failure to meet these conditions or being convicted of a major crime or drug-related offense would lead to the loss of temporary residency and deportation. Throughout the process, students would be ineligible for Pell educational grants. In the 2009 DREAM Act, military service is offered as a test of loyalty and a way to identify and reward "good" immigrants who merit citizenship. Many activists have noted that the act can be read as a de facto racial and economic form of the draft (Mariscal, 2009), since the number of undocumented Latinas/os (and other immigrant populations) able to finish two or four years of college has not been rising significantly (Gonzales, 2009; Santiago, 2008). Passel (2003) estimates that of the 80,000 undocumented youth who have lived in the United States for five years or longer that reach the age of 18 each year, 65,000 graduate from high school and only 7,000 to 13,000 enroll in post-secondary education.(2) Moreover, this legislation reproduces heteronormativity, since military service requires one to be gender conforming and heterosexual (or a closeted non-heterosexual). As in the World War I and World War II periods, naturalization and participation in the permanent war economy have become a viable script for vulnerable youth to gain legal status. Yet, this script attempts to erase how these systems or complexes, military and prison, actively and continuously harm some of the most vulnerable populations inside and outside the United States. Since immigration detention is a central component of our prison system and military service serves as a potential pathway for legalization (for select youth), it is vital to examine how the prison and military complexes intersect and attempt to constrain and map futures for undocumented youth (Mariscal, 2009; Rodriguez, 2008; Davis, 2005). The military and the prison are networks that suture capital, communities, and the state to a permanent war and punishment economy. According to geographer and activist Ruth Gilmore, these complexes are intimately linked to our day-to-day lives: It's not just the business and military interests. We have all the people who are dependent on these expenditures of public money for the military. This includes all the people in all the towns that got the military bases and people who work at the bases. All the people in the academy who get federal grants and contracts to do classified and unclassified research and development. All of the intellectuals in the quasi-public nonprofits like the RAND Corporation that write reports for the military. Of course, you also have people like Lockheed, Boeing, the generals and Joint Chiefs of Staff and so forth. All of those people make up the Military Industrial Complex (Gilmore, n.d: 3). These complexes also shape pathways for advocacy in progressive justice movements, in particular within the still far-too-separate immigration and criminal justice (anti-prison) movements. …