The Security-Migration Nexus and the National Day Labor Organizing Network (NDLON)

This paper explores the myriad of ways that the National Day Labor Organizing Network (NDLON), the largest network of worker centers in the U.S., has contested the security state and its apparatuses of migration control in the... [ view full abstract ]

This paper explores the myriad of ways that the National Day Labor Organizing Network (NDLON), the largest network of worker centers in the U.S., has contested the security state and its apparatuses of migration control in the aftermath of September 11. Scholarship on NDLON has primarily examined its formation across multiple geographic spaces and its historic agreement in 2006 with the AFL-CIO (Dziembowska 2010). More recent literature (Apostolidis &Valenzuela 2014) has explored the possibilities of an anti-neoliberal cosmopolitan politics in the migrant day labor movement by detailing the movement’s growth and its transnational alliances to improve the precarious conditions of day laborers. This paper builds on this literature by analyzing NDLON’s contestation of the security-migration nexus and its subsequent rise to national prominence within the immigrant rights movement. I will examine the case National Day Labor Organizing Network (NDLON) v. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE)—a Freedom of Information lawsuit that forced the release of documents pertaining to the Secure Communities Program; NDLON’s series of concerts—Chant Down the Walls; and their grassroots mobilizations through the Not1More Campaign. I suggest that NDLON’s resistance to the security state’s disciplinary functions (surveillance, detention, deportation) through these strategies illustrate their counter-hegemonic migration politics and strengthen the argument that the organization has radical cosmopolitan characteristics.