Corruption at the Border: Intersections between US Labour Demands,Border Control,and Human Smuggling Economies

Based on a qualitative methodology that includes in‐depth interviews conducted between 2008 and 2017 with 180 migrant smugglers from Mexico, the objective of this paper is to analyse the way US employers' interest in having access to cheap labour feeds migrant smuggling, and is connected to corruption in US border enforcement. We conclude that corruption on the US side of the border could be systematic and not a matter of a few bad apples. Corruption is manifested in selective enforcement, which is a pragmatic practice that justifies enhanced immigration enforcement, and benefits US immigration agents, US employers and Mexican smugglers, while undocumented border crossers suffer the monstrous effects of militarised border enforcement.     

A crisis of rights and responsibility: feminist geopolitical perspectives on Latin American refugees and migrants

With the advent of the Trump presidency we are facing the most anti-refugee and immigrant administration in recent U.S. history. This follows on the heels of the Obama era, characterized by record deportations and severe U.S. policies of deterrence towards Latin American refugees and migrants in its own backyard. This aggressive expansion of U.S. Homeland Security migration control included: outsourcing enforcement to Mexico; re-introducing migrant family detention; increasing ‘family unit’ raids; and accelerating immigration court hearings. These strategies of state deterrence and enforcement heightened vulnerability of asylum-seeking women and children from Mexico and Central America to human and legal rights abuses. I employ a feminist geopolitical approach to interrogate the intimate and embodied spaces of migration controls that ground the workings of the state in the normalized, routine, and informal practices of state officials and in the experiences of vulnerable yet resilient women and children refugees. Drawing upon examples from two research projects, informed by personal experience as a volunteer, I critically examine the everyday state practices of U.S./Mexico migration enforcement in three arenas - border security spaces, legal spaces, and carceral spaces. I contend that rather than an ‘immigrant or refugee crisis,’ these restrictive and intimate performances routinely deployed by border and legal bureaucrats reproduce and reinforce the structural and systemic crisis of rights and responsibility we are currently witnessing. Through a feminist ethic of care, social justice, and action, migrant and refugee narratives of everyday restriction may be deployed in resisting rights abuses and fostering responsibility, humanity, and hospitality towards newcomers.     

An anatomy of race and immigration politics in California

At the US–Mexico border specific community organizations have played an important role in reinforcing and challenging dominant ideas about race and immigration through a series of protest and media campaigns. In this paper I explore the ways in which key community organizations have relied upon specific and specified constructions of race and ethnicity to redefine notions of borders and identities. I argue that an examination of debates around immigration reveals the centrality (and marginalization) of the images and spaces of the racialized immigrant body. An exploration of the ways in which policy, media, national and individual identities are mapped on to particular spaces provides an opportunity to interrogate and challenge the 'naturalness' of representations of race and immigration and the ways in which power is strategically located yet hidden in discussions of the border(s).     

“Security,mobility, and the body – Syrian insurgent groups’ infrastructures and their geopolitical contestations through/by/in legal institutions”

Political geographers have repeatedly demonstrated how the ‘global war on/of terror’ has led to repressive and unjust international and domestic policies. Nevertheless, little has been said about the multifold intertwinements between such ‘Western’ perceptions and their shaping of anti-terrorism efforts within. To this end, this paper draws on recent feminist understandings of scale, global/local processes, and geopolitics, suggesting how these might be combined with current European participations in Syria, and its legal prosecution as ‘state-endangering actions.’ By visiting the sites where issues on security, mobility, and their interrelated body actions have been negotiated, I deploy an intersectional and multi-scalar analysis of how a layered system of gender-rendered and racialized patterns intersects with/in Germany's legal institutions combating terrorism wherever it may occur as well as the way multifold and different modes of support and logistics have been carried out through the European Schengen Area to Syria. Combining both feminist geopolitics and the vibrant work of (feminist) geolegalities, I offer another way of redressing Hyndman's call (2019) for expanding the tent of feminist geopolitics by not reversing the former, but through refocusing on embodied and material power-geometries and (legally) interconnected sites of an Islam-rendered, Western state-defined ‘war on/of terrorism’ simultaneously.     

Politics squeezed through a police state: Policing and vinculación in post-1968 Mexico City

Contemporary political geographers accommodate everyday practice in accounts of state power but arguably tend to retain a bias towards sites easily identified with the state. This bias complements a frequent conflation of policing and the state in recent scholarship on the post-political. This article challenges these assumptions by showing how rituals of anti-stateness may themselves paradoxically give to the senses a partitioned world of state domination and non-state resistance that delimits political possibility. I specifically examine activist participation in such policing through analysis of student-left commemorations of 1968 in Mexico City. My analysis of such activism also reveals tension in processes that consolidate a partitioned state/non-state world. I show that, through vinculación, some activists establish unaccounted-for solidarities that exceed the categories through which state power has in the past been exercised, reconfiguring relations between people whose place vis-à-vis the state would otherwise be predictable. I therefore reveal ongoing interplay between processes of politics and policing, not a “post-political condition” that would demand, as politics, the negation of any social-spatial order.     

From humanitarian exceptionalism to contingent care: Care and enforcement at the humanitarian border

Throughout the world, increasingly securitized and militarized border enforcement efforts have made transnational migration an increasingly deadly endeavor for unauthorized migrants. The deadly consequences of unauthorized migration has compelled the emergence of what William Walters refers to as the humanitarian border—the concentration of humanitarian aid and services along the edges of the global North. This paper expands on Walters work through an in-depth analysis of the emergence and transformation of the humanitarian border in southern Arizona, USA. Through an examination of transformations in how migrant care is provisioned, overseen, and regulated in southern Arizona, this paper traces a shift from humanitarian exceptionalism to contingent care whereby care is increasingly linked with enforcement efforts. In doing so, this analysis illustrates how care functions as a technology of border enforcement, increasing the reach of the state to govern more bodies and more spaces.     

United States–Mexico: The Convergence of Public Policy Views in the Post‐9/11 World

This article explores the state of public policy preferences between the United States and Mexico in the realm of foreign policy in the context of the post‐9/11 world, democratic change within Mexico, and the immigration protests within the United States. Specifically, we will analyze the differences and possible convergence of public policy views on the issues of terrorism, immigration, free trade agreements, drug trafficking, and foreign policy. We find that although there are differences of opinion, particularly in the application of force in Iraq and on the benefits of free trade, there still remains a significant degree of positive convergence within the policy issues of terrorism, immigration, and drug trafficking. Although there are institutional impediments to progressive policy change, future relations between the United States and Mexico do not need to be contentious as long as the focus is on the similarities, rather than the differences, in public preferences between the populations of the two states.     

Policing authoritarian neoliberalism in South London

In pointing out the exclusionary and nondemocratic reconceptualization of states following the financial and Eurozone crises, research by geographers and critical political economists on authoritarian neoliberalism (AN) has shed light on key state transformations. Exploring the criminalization of council estates and the policing of three austerity-ridden south London districts, this article contributes to efforts to expand the concept of AN further by centering questions of violence and physical state power in the form of discourses and practices of (criminal) punishment and policing. Building on qualitative work with local young people and interviews with former police officers, community leaders and activists, I demonstrate the spatial dimension of AN and the role of policing logic and mechanisms for its administration in south London. I argue that through post-crisis austerity measures and long-term mechanisms of criminalization, young people perceive their home neighborhoods as insecure and alter how they navigate them. Further, I show that spaces of inclusion and welfare, such as social housing estates and schools, have been reimagined as sites of exclusion and punishment, often administered by police.     

The war on terror in American grand strategy

The 9/11 attacks made the war on terror the central plank of American grand strategy. Yet despite its importance in shaping US policy choices, there has been considerable confusion over how the war on terror relates to foreign policy goals. This article attempts to locate the war on terror within American grand strategy and makes three claims. First, it argues that the Bush administration's approach to the war on terror rests on a false analogy between terrorism and fascism or communism. This has led to misinterpretations of the goals of the war on terror and to a persistent misuse of American power. Second, it suggests that the central purpose of the war on terror should be to de‐legitimize terror as a tactic and to induce states to assume responsibility for controlling terrorists within their borders. American grand strategy should be focused on creating a normative anti‐terror regime with costly commitments by linchpin states—defined as great powers and crucial but endangered allies such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia—rather than on conducting regime change against rogue states on the margins of the international system. Success in the war on terror should be measured not by the perceived legitimacy of discrete US policy choices, but by the number of these crucial states who accept the de‐legitimation of terrorism as a core foreign policy principle and act accordingly. Third, it argues that bilateral enforcement of an anti‐terror regime imposes high costs for US power and puts other elements of American grand strategy— including the promotion of democracy and the promotion of human rights—at risk. To reduce these costs and to preserve American power over the long‐term, the US should attempt to institutionalize cooperation in the war on terror and to scale back ambitious policy choices (such as achieving a democratic revolution in the Middle East) which increase the risks of state defection from the anti‐terror regime.     

Border protection,the 2001 Australian election and the coalition victory

While the issue of refugees and asylum-seekers has preoccupied many European countries, until the November 2001 federal election Australia had largely been immune from the problem. In the election, border protection—combining the Tampa crisis with the ‘war against terrorism’—were central electoral issues. Analysis of the 2001 Australian Election Study shows that border protection cost Labor the election. Labor suffered defections to the Democrats and Greens over its position on refugees and asylum-seekers, and defections to the Coalition on terrorism. Negative public attitudes towards asylum-seekers rested on oppo sition to immigration, but also on a particular dislike of arrivals from the Middle East. By contrast, support for the ‘war on terrorism’ was based mainly on notions of fairness and democracy. Of the two border protection issues— asylum-seekers and terrorism—terrorism was the more important of the two in shaping the election outcome. If 11 September had occurred but the Tampa crisis had not, the Coalition would in all probability still have won the election.     

Role playing: a feminist-geopolitical analysis of the everyday workings of the Mexican state

Participatory methods are increasingly important to geographical research of ‘the everyday,’ yet their viability as a means to understand on-the-ground geopolitical processes has been less explored. This article contributes to the growing body of literature on participatory research in geography and feminist geopolitics by arguing for the use of a specific participatory tool – role play. We present an example of our employment of the technique in a case study on using the method during research with Central American immigrants living in the Mexico–Guatemala border city of Tapachula, Mexico. In doing so, we provide an in-depth examination of the implementation of role play, demonstrating its usefulness in revealing immigrant women's daily experiences with low- to mid-level state actors as they seek to avail themselves of their rights. We conclude that role play is particularly well suited to revealing these experiences due to its encouragement of creativity, embodiment through performance and facilitation of in-depth discussion of difficult subject matter.     

CHANGES IN THE RELATIVE EARNINGS GAP BETWEEN NATIVES AND IMMIGRANTS ALONG THE U.S.‐MEXICO BORDER*

ABSTRACT Using 1990 and 2000 U.S. census data, this study investigates changes in immigrant/native earnings disparities for workers in U.S. cities along the international border with Mexico vis‐à‐vis the U.S. interior during the 1990s. Our findings—based on estimating earnings functions and employing the Juhn‐Murphy‐Pierce (1993, JPE) wage decomposition technique—indicate that the average earnings of Mexican immigrants along the U.S.‐Mexico border improved relative to those accrued by their counterparts in the U.S. interior and by otherwise similar U.S.‐born Mexican Americans between 1990 and 2000. However, when comparing Mexican‐born workers to U.S.‐born non‐Hispanic whites, the immigrant border‐earnings penalty remained statistically unchanged.     

Police power in green: Furthering political ecologies of the state

The growth of wildlife and environmental crime has catalysed efforts to strengthen state policing to better exert control over activities, flows, and people that threaten states’ desired socio-ecological orders. The expanded role of policing in and over human-environment relations provokes conceptual and empirical imperatives to better centre policing in political ecology and political geography scholarship on state-environment relations. This article begins with the question of how political ecology might better account for and conceptualise policing power, and how doing so can help understand how, where, and through what practices and institutions states exercise power over socio-ecological relations. To capture the role of policing in exerting power and control over socio-ecological orders, this article brings together insights on critical theories of police power, conservation power and state power to develop the concept of police power in green. I argue that police power in green grounds the mechanisms through which state power is exerted over socio-ecological relations in ways that reflect a broader strengthening of state power. I use multi-scalar and ethnographic research to examine three processes that extend and expand police power in green, and related state power. These are: 1) expanding conservation law and criminality beyond conservation spaces to national territory; 2) creating new environmental police bodies; 3) strengthening and expanding traditional policing, enforcement and criminal justice institutions. I end by outlining how police power in green can connect and further critical scholarship on political ecologies of the state and broader debates on policing, the green state and state power.     

Confined within: National territories as zones of confinement

The securitization of immigration has led to increased reliance on border enforcement, detention, and deportation to control unauthorized movements. Based on a case study of the ways that Salvadoran immigrants to the United States have experienced these tactics, this paper analyzes the spatial implications of current enforcement strategies. As movement across borders becomes more difficult for the unauthorized, national territories become zones of confinement. This carceral quality is a dimension of national territory in that undocumented and temporarily authorized migrants cannot exit their countries of residence without losing territorially-conferred rights, while if they are deported, their countries of origin become extensions of the detention centers they occupied before exit. This transformation of national spaces is accompanied by internal differentiation, as interior enforcement confines migrants to subnational spaces where they must remain to avoid detection or harassment. Securitization thus entails both extraterritoriality, that is the extension of U.S. legal regimes into foreign territories, and intraterritoriality, or the operation of different legal regimes within national territories. The paper also highlights the ways that securitization contributes to multidimensionality, such that spatial locations are rendered ambiguous, both inside and outside at the same time. Finally, the paper considers how these spatial transformations redefine citizenship and belonging.     

What You See Is (Not) What You Get? The Taiwan Question,Geo‐economic Realities,and the “China Threat” Imaginary

Abstract: Despite emergent trends of geo‐economic integration between nation‐states, the role of realist‐driven geopolitical calculation appears highly enduring. This paper explores the potential contradictions between state‐centric geopolitical concerns and transnational geo‐economic formation through an exploration of China–US tensions over Taiwan, a territory of indeterminate geo‐legal status and which China regards as its own province. I consider how the Taiwan Relations Act, a domestic public law of the US that frames US–Taiwan relations and has a major influence on East Asian geopolitics, could contradict emergent “China region”, and possibly even China–US, geo‐economic integration. This is because the US‐sustained arms sales to Taiwan rest on imagining and containing China as a “threat”, while geo‐economic integration entails enrolling China as a strategic partner, if not an ally. Consequently, the Taiwan issue could stifle the enhancement of Sino‐American relations at a historical juncture when the Chinese and American economies are more intertwined than ever.     

THE 2010 ANTIPODE RGS‐IBG LECTURE Wars of Interpretations

Abstract: Since 2006, when Mexico's President declared war against the drug trade, the people of the northern Mexican border city, Ciudad Juárez, have been living through a record‐breaking escalation of violence, the occupation of their city by federal troops and police forces, unprecedented human and civil rights violations, and a pervasive experience of fear in public space. These events have occurred simultaneous to a devastating economic crisis. This paper asks the question, how can a feminist and Marxist geographer contribute to an analysis of what is happening in Ciudad Juárez? To address this question, I create a dialogue among activists in northern Mexico and post‐structuralist feminist and Marxist positions regarding the meaning of public fear in this city for the city's residents, for Mexico's democracy and for the making of public knowledge about the Mexico–US border.     

Bringing Back the (B)order: Post‐9/11 Politics of Immigration,Borders, and Belonging in the Contemporary US South

Abstract: Post 9/11, debates about borders, immigration, and belonging have reached a new intensity in the US South. The temporal overlap of growing immigration to the South since the late 1990s and growing nativist sentiment across the US since 9/11 has led southern communities to fuse new regional racial demographics to new national border anxieties. This convergence enables southern political elites to address the changing contours of local communities through recourse to national imperatives of border security, all the while avoiding an explicit language of race in a thoroughly racialized debate. In an analysis of recent political maneuvers in the South, this article examines what happens when debates about nation, community, and borders are relocated to southern spaces heretofore absent in discussions of immigration. It argues that legislative actions against immigrant populations in southern states are virulent and multi‐scalar border policings in which concerns about the social and cultural boundaries of southern communities, new racial projects across the South, and post‐9/11 immigrant anxieties across the US become inseparable. To conclude, it discusses the theoretical insight that this critical assessment of the South's new border projects offers vis‐à‐vis understandings of, and struggles against, exclusion, racism, and social injustice.     

“Rousers of the Rabble” in the New Mexico Land Grant War: La Alianza Federal De Mercedes and the Violence of the State

Abstract: This paper examines the patterns of state‐sponsored and state‐tolerated violence directed at a social movement organization in New Mexico known as La Alianza Federal de Mercedes during the 1960s and 1970s. Beginning in the 1960s, Alianza mobilized a broad‐based movement of Chicano activists and Hispano land grant communities to advocate the return of lands they claimed had been stolen following the Mexican American War of 1846–1848. As a result, its leaders and many of its members became targets of law enforcement surveillance programs and counterintelligence operations. In this paper I examine the patterns of surveillance and physical violence directed at Alianza members. Confronted by Alianza's challenge to racial inequality and economic injustice, the state construed Alianza as a generalized, and racialized, threat to social order that required in response the use of coercive control and physical violence.