Sovereignty vs. Subversion: Cold War Immigration Politics and the Metastasis of the US Security State

Rick Baldoz, Associate Professor of American Studies

This talk will explore how the entanglement of US immigration policy and national security imperatives during the early decades of the Cold War. I will also examine how the coercive machinery of the US state has been reimagined and reconfigured to administer both internal and external security threats tracing how these policies have produced both liberal and illiberal border regimes.

Rick Baldoz is a scholar of immigration, US empire, and Asian American Studies with a particular focus on the convergence of foreign and domestic policy imperatives in demarcating, delimiting, and administering the borders of the national community. More broadly, his work grapples with the politics of citizenship and national belonging and the fashioning of boundary processes (national, racial, ideological) that determine membership in American society.