Part One: Invisibility

Invisibility, as defined in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, is “impossible to see: not visible”. When this term, as used in our class, is applied to identities and the ways they are legislated, there are some inconsistencies. The term “invisibility” also implies a sense of passivity, that the object or individual simply cannot be seen because it is the object itself that is not visible. Rather, through the process of recognition, categorization and stereotyping, marginalization occurs. I argue that the concept of invisibility does not capture the active recognition and oppression of specific communities and identities.

Erving Goffman’s piece “Stigma and Social Identity” prefaces this idea of active marginalization. By having a societal definable “normal” and “stigma”, communities are already creating these categories of privilege and oppression. It is not that particular communities are inherently invisible;they exist in a hierarchy that makes communities “reduced in our minds from the whole and usual person to a tainted, discounted one” (Goffman, 3). It is through this social hierarchy that marginalized communities are oppressed, as seen with individuals who are undocumented and homeless.

Undocumented workers exemplify the concept of active marginalization through laws and governmental organizations that surround and regulate their presence. In the article about ICE raids,Erik Camayd-Freixas discusses the 2008 Postville, Iowa Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raid of a factory based on a single matching claim of identity theft, and how this mass trial and deportation process occurred through his eyes as an interpreter. This article demonstrated how the government systematically targeted a specific group, planned a large scale raid, forced guilty pleas and deported one third the population of a town. If the undocumented population were invisible, organization such as ICE could not be closely monitoring for possible locales of undocumented workers. The very creation of ICE shows that undocumented immigrants can be sought out and deported in mass human rights atrocities. If the undocumented population was invisible, there is no way that such government organizations would exist and be able to tactfully carry out such population- specific and targeted procedures. Rather, it is active oppression that leads to the exclusion of these communities.

Legally, the government also recognizes and legislates undocumented immigrants and their rights. Through the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, local police are allowed to work with ICE to target and detain “criminal illegal aliens.” This Act shows that the government knows about undocumented communities and their presence, making them visible, and it is rather the targeted removal that renders undocumented individuals marginalized. This Act is not an isolated piece of legislature that governs undocumented individuals. Another example of legal regulation of undocumented workers is the Immigration Reform and Control Act 1986 (IRCA). IRCA says the hiring of undocumented workers is illegal, unless during certain seasons, and also legalize immigrants who entered before 1982. These kinds of legislation inform the rights and lifestyles of undocumented workers, showing how the government is able to utilize these populations when it is beneficial to their t countries economic growth and prosperity, while denying them basic rights of citizenship and access to resources. By controlling undocumented populations, seeking them out, and legislating them, the government and other institutions have too many interactions with these communities to render them invisible.

Some may say that the term invisibility does better encompass marginalized groups. This argument frames the concept of invisibility with social perceptions of those people considered invisible. In Goffman’s piece, he uses the idea of visible stigma, defined as “bodily signs designed to expose something unusual and bad about the moral status of the signifier” (Goffman, 1), such as “physical abnormalities or markers”. Using this framework, some identities may seem invisible. Particular identities, like undocumented status, do not have any physical markers that differ them from the “normals”, making individuals unaware of their presence. In that sense, these identities are invisible. However, this invisibility is very limited to a one-on-one basis. Even if an identity is not known about or perceived on an individual level, institutions still legislate these identities. Institutional powers oppress these communities, making this application of power and privilege more than just about invisibility.

These same principles of active marginalization can be seen with individuals who are homeless. Homeless individuals are both socially and legally marginalized through active processes that occur. Socially, homeless individuals are not invisible as one can walk down a street and see their physical presence. Rather, because they are breaking social norms and have a variety of stereotyped attached to them, we do not want to see them. Homeless individuals are couched in terms of being “undesirables” and “broken windows” (Kelling and Wilson, 3). George Kelling and James Wilson describe how homeless individuals are comparable to broken windows, since both are perceived to be signs of a disorderly society. Due to the stigma attached to them, we choose to ignore their presence so as not to associate with their subordinated identity (Goffman, 20). This process is something that the term invisibility cannot actively capture, as it does not encapsulate the reasons, privilege, and stigma at play.

On the legal side, homeless individuals are also actively marginalized. The Parks Exclusion Acts authorizes the police to immediately remove individuals from public city parks for minor infractions and also allows them to potentially ban these individuals for up to one year (Beckett and Herbert, 13). Other types of spatial cleansing can occur through SODA and SOAP Orders, prohibiting individuals from areas known for drug sales and prostitution. These procedures can be done without a prior hearing, and allow for large amounts of discretion. Through these laws, homeless communities are removed and excluded from particular areas, showing how, through government officers, homeless individuals are targeted and thus not inherently invisible.

Counterarguments for invisibility as applied to homelessness include the physical removal of individuals. When SOAP/SODA orders are executed, as well as orders made under the Parks Exclusion Laws, individuals are removed and banned from spaces, therefore, rendering them invisible in those spaces. This invisibility is a very individual sense of the concept. Individuals who are homeless are present everywhere, and banning some from particular areas does not prevent the laws, stigma, and presence of all people in the homeless community. Even if a few individuals are removed, there will always be someone else who is “trespassing” in these spaces. Therefore, despite focusing on the same scale removal of individuals, the larger presence and issue of homelessness is still very pervasive. As explained in the concept of disneyfication by Randall Amsterin his work “Patterns of Exclusion: Sanitizing Space, Criminalizing Homelessness”, removing individuals from areas is done in order to create a retreat or utopia inside of a dystopia. In order to create this temporary illusion of perfection, one must acknowledge the presence of less than perfection in order to establish something different. Through this chain of logic, invisibility once again cannot encapsulate the totality of governmental forces and social stigma that marginalize homeless individuals.

Labeling identities as invisible discounts the institutional frameworks that are actively oppressing these individuals. By couching people in terms of “invisibility”, the word may account for the societal populations’ unawareness or ignorance to these communities and the ways in which they exist, but not the larger structures that regulate these communities. Rather than placing the responsibility of being oppressed on the individual, using discourse that reflects larger institutional oppression better describes the power and privilege at play. The terms “underrepresented” and “marginalized”better communicate the processes of oppression and lack of institutional power and advocacy that these populations face.. These two words mean “provide(d) with insufficient or inadequate representation” and “treat(ing) a person as insignificant or peripheral,” respectively. The definitions encapsulate the dismissal of the needs of individual who are homeless, the lack of empathic action, as well as underrepresentation and dehumanization of undocumented immigrants. By changing this discourse to use more representative language, the issue at hand can be holistically represented and place responsibility of current situations on privileged individuals in power.