(Re)making of a Racialized Citizenry: U.S. Immigration Politics at a Crossroads (again)

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This article examines how U.S. immigration and citizenship policies reconcile the tension between capital's demand for exploitable labor and the state's project of racialized national membership, and argues that Trump's second-term agenda pushes this compromise toward breakdown. Drawing on Lisa Lowe's theorization of the capital–state contradiction, the paper traces how laws from the Naturalization Act of 1790 through Chinese exclusion, national origins quotas, and post-9/11 security regimes constructed racialized immigrants as indispensable workers yet perpetually foreign and deportable. It then analyzes the second Trump administration's efforts to undermine birthright citizenship, expand travel bans and racialized refugee preferences, generalize deportability, and normalize emergency authority, showing how these measures collapse boundaries between immigration enforcement, citizenship, and ordinary law. The article concludes with implications for Korean immigration debates, offering the U.S. experience as a cautionary example of how racialized exclusion destabilizes both economy and democracy.