The politics of exhaustion: temporal whiplash, collective depletion, and the governance of immigrant life

This article enlists the politics of exhaustion as a framework for understanding U.S. immigration governance. Drawing on ethnographic research with undocumented students and their families, community organisations in Southern California, and communities of migration and return in Guatemala, I argue that immigration enforcement wears people down through temporal whiplash: the forced oscillation between prolonged uncertainty and sudden demands for action. Exhaustion begins in the body but moves outward into collective depletion, as families, communities, organisations, and social movements absorb the costs of survival and repair. Exhaustion is also a strategy of governance that extracts labour, money, data, and care from communities denied stability while generating profit from their precarity. Across contexts, I show how temporal whiplash produces instability, collective depletion spreads its costs, and extractive capitalism profits from the exhaustion that follows. The article concludes by proposing a praxis of replenishment as a commitment to building systems that sustain life, renew the commons of care, value reciprocal learning, and imagine futures otherwise.