Running Head: IMMIGRATION AND NEOLIBERALISM Immigration and Neoliberalism: Viewing Immigrants as Economic Entities Svilen V. Trifonov Graduate Student University of Minnesota Abstract: In my rhetorical analysis of President Obama’s 2011 El Paso speech on immigration reform, I engage and connect contemporary scholarship on border rhetorics, neoliberalism, and immigration. I examine and interrogate President Obama’s tendency to portray immigrants as economic units which reified existing rhetorical borders of immigration veiled under the allegedly race-neutral language of neoliberalism and late capitalism. Throughout the essay, I argue that the President adopted a neoliberal approach of treating immigrants as economic commodities, as well as subjects that need to be regulated and surveilled. A central point of my criticism is President Obama’s rhetorical strategy of connecting neoliberalism and whiteness for the purpose of implicitly excluding Mexican immigrants from access to U.S. national space and publics. Barack Obama endorsed the neoliberal principles of flexibility and productivity that allow foreign workers to be used for their skills but sent back to their homes as soon as their services are no longer required, or when they become an economic burden to the state. In what appears as a double bind, immigrants from Mexico are perceived as beneficial for the U.S. economy as a cheap source of temporary labor, but also potentially threatening as racialized subjects always/already suspect of criminality. Additionally, I argue that President Obama’s neoliberal rhetoric relied on a strategic omission and silencing of the cultural and economic significance of Mexican immigrants. Keywords: immigration, neoliberalism, border, race, economy (Essay presented during National Communication Association 99 th Annual Convention, Washington, DC, November 2013)