© Philosophy Today, Volume 64, Issue 4 (Fall 2020). ISSN 0031-8256 1–5 Philosophy Today DOI: 10.5840/philtoday2020644361 Socially Undocumented Oppression: “Goldilocks” Liberalism or Something New? JOSÉ JORGE MENDOZA Introduction K arl Marx famously began his magnum opus, Capital, by analyzing the most ordinary thing in a capitalist society: the commodity. He believed that by interrogating this most ordinary of things, by look- ing at how it had come about and the function it played in capitalist society, it would reveal something very extraordinary, namely the exploitative nature of the capitalist system. In many ways, Reed-Sandoval’s Socially Undocumented: Identity and Immigrations Justice shares something of Marx’s strategy. Reed-Sandoval opens the book with the example of Alejandra, a twenty-one-year-old woman who must cross a militarized U.S.-Mexico border on an almost daily basis in order to pursue a university degree. Alejandra has legal permission to cross the border, so there is nothing illegal or nefarious about her actions. Nonetheless, her border-crossing experiences are ofen flled with degrading and unnecessarily stressful treatment and it is clear that this treatment, which she and others like her receive, is strongly correlated to their race and class. For those who have grown up in a world of militarized borders, Alejandra’s experience is nothing out of the ordinary. As Reed-Sandoval writes “Countless Mexico-U.S. border-crossers have experiences similar to those of Alejandra on a daily basis, and such experiences are widely regarded as normal (even by many of the border-crossers themselves).” 1 But what Reed-Sandoval wants to do in this book is show that “this story, in all of its ‘ordinariness,’ is indicative of something pernicious, widespread, and profoundly unjust about immigration policy and its enforcement in the United States.” 2 What an analysis of these ordinary stories reveals is an obvious, yet hidden, oppressed social group that she terms the “so-