Immigration Geopolitics Beyond the Mexico–US Border

Despite the centrality of Mexico–US border policing to pre‐ and post‐9/11 US immigration geopolitics, perhaps the most significant yet largely ignored immigration‐related fallout of the so‐called war on terrorism has been the extension of interior immigration policing practices away from the southwest border. As I outline in this paper, these interior spaces of immigration geopolitics—nominally said to be about fighting terrorism, but in practice concerned with undocumented labor migration across the Mexico–US border—have not emerged accidentally. Rather, the recent criminalization of immigration law, the sequestering of immigration enforcement from court oversight and the enrollment of proxy immigration officers at sub‐state scales have been actively pursued so as to make interior enforcement newly central to US immigration geopolitics. I argue here that these embryonic spaces of localized immigration geopolitics shed new light on the spatiality of US immigration governance, which has typically been thought of by geographers as active predominantly at the territorial margins of the state. I conclude the paper with some thoughts as to how geographers might rethink the what and where of contemporary US immigration geopolitics.     

Securing the Return: How Enhanced US Border Enforcement Fuels Cycles of Debt Migration

Expanded border enforcement has made unauthorised migration to the US more risky, costly, and prone to failure. Research on the material consequences of border enforcement for migrant‐sending households in Central America reveals that the economic hardships enforcement exacts on migrants at times diminishes enforcement's desired deterrent power. Heightened risks have driven up the cost of migration and pushed many to fund their trips through loans. Consequently, migrant detention, deportation, or death can result in poverty and privation for indebted households and the seizure of loan collateral, typically homes and land, in turn prompting crises in household reproduction. With a US wage the most viable means to ameliorate economic hardships, enforcement outcomes push some to return migration. Our findings suggest that US border enforcement efforts at times perpetuate the very unauthorised migration they seek to impede, while also helping to reproduce the border itself by deepening the marginalisation that drives migration decisions.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 31, Number 1. February 2015

Front and back cover caption, volume 31 issue 1 Front cover CHINESE DEVELOPMENT ASSISTANCE The front cover shows a Chinese foreman, a migrant worker from Anhui province, and two Ethiopian labourers, working on a ditch along a road under construction in southeastern Tigray, northern Ethiopia, 2 December 2011. China's engagement with Africa is based on ‘win‐win cooperation’, Chinese diplomats claim, and is therefore fundamentally different from Western initiatives on the African continent. However, the situation on the ground tells another story. In this issue, Miriam Driessen offers a glance at daily life on Chinese road building sites in Ethiopia, revealing the striking parallels between Chinese development activities in Ethiopia and Western aid. Central to these parallels is the profound discrepancy between the expectations of Chinese workers prior to migration and the much less rosy realities faced on the construction site. Convinced of the goodwill nature of their activities, Chinese migrants were puzzled by the apparent ingratitude of local Ethiopians, their lack of cooperation, and, worse, repeated attempts to sabotage the building work. In this regard, Chinese struggles with development assistance in Ethiopia strike a familiar chord when we consider the reception of Western aid projects in Africa and elsewhere. Not new is the hiatus between optimistic and sometimes presumptuous development narratives and the frustration that follows in the face of the realities on the ground. Chinese struggles with development assistance in Ethiopia prove, once again, that development aid projects often do not work out as anticipated, because abstract and simplistic development policies may fail to fit complex realities. Back cover UNDOCUMENTED, UNACCOMPANIED MINORS IN US CUSTODY A rescue from the Rio Grande River: US Customs and Border Protection provide assistance to unaccompanied children after they have crossed the border into the United States. Until recently, news stories on immigration have exposed the appalling conditions of adult immigration detention facilities and chronicled the massive enforcement machinery that has resulted in record numbers of deportations since 2008. However, they have largely ignored the plight of unaccompanied Mexican and Central American children who cross the border alone, are apprehended by immigration authorities, and land in federal custody. The frenzied media coverage of desperate young migrants crossing the border in the summer of 2014 has galvanized the public but also created powerful myths about who these children are, why they are coming to ‘El Norte’, and what we need to do with them after their apprehension. In this issue, Susan Terrio tells the story of the Central American and Mexican migrants who are driven from home by violence and deprivation and embark alone, risking their lives on the perilous journey north. They suffer coercive arrests at the US border, land in detention, and wage an uphill battle to obtain legal status. It sheds light on a shadowy juvenile detention system run by the US government that has escaped public scrutiny for years. It shows how the government got into the business of detaining children and what we can learn from this troubled history.     

Trafficking in US Agriculture

Based on a qualitative methodology that includes in‐depth interviews with 90 Mexican migrant smugglers and 45 Central American farmworkers, this article analyzes the three separate elements of trafficking in US agriculture, namely acts, means, and purposes. We conclude that some US employers participate in human trafficking by financing or helping to recruit and transport Mexican and Central American migrants to the US by means of “abuse of a position of vulnerability” for the purposes of involuntary servitude, debt bondage, and sex exploitation.     

Undocumented Immigration and Host‐Country Welfare: Competition Across Segmented Labor Markets*

Abstract. In this paper's model, undocumented workers are endogenously sorted into secondary labor markets. When further illegal immigration occurs, some new migrants follow their fellows into already migrant‐dominated jobs, lowering migrant wages and raising real incomes of host‐country labor and capital. Some submarkets switch from employing legal workers to employing migrants, lowering demand for and wages of legal workers. Undocumented immigration is Pareto‐improving when enforcement reserves primary‐sector jobs for legal workers. Pareto‐dominant policies target the number of migrant‐dominated submarkets, not the number of migrants. This appears consistent with U.S. enforcement practices. The effects of deportations, employer sanctions, and amnesties are explored.     

Illegal immigration,unemployment, and multiple destinations

We develop a multicountry model of illegal immigration with equilibrium unemployment. Two geographic cases are considered. One has two destinations adjacent to the source country while the other has just one destination country adjacent to it. In both cases, the equilibrium border control proves insufficient compared with the joint optimum, calling for enforcement by federal authorities. Absent such authorities, delegating border control to the country with a larger native labor force can improve each destination country’s welfare. In contrast, the equilibrium internal enforcement policy is efficient, obviating enforcement by supranational authorities.     

A THEORETICAL EXPOSITION OF MIGRATION ENFORCEMENT ON EXISTING MIGRANT AND DOMESTIC HOUSEHOLDS*

ABSTRACT This paper presents a model with a domestic household and a heterogeneous migrant household in arrival timing. The domestic and documented migrant households divide their one unit of time between lobbying for/against immigration enforcement expenditures and employment. The analysis shows that an increase in public dislike for undocumented workers lowers domestic and existing migrant households private investment in own child education. It also causes average public expenditures on education to fall and leads to a negative impact on the educational outcomes of all households.     

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.     

On Narco‐coyotaje: Illicit Regimes and Their Impacts on the US–Mexico Border

Many have debated whether or not human smugglers, known as coyotes, are involved with drug trafficking organizations. Scholars have largely rejected so‐called “narcocoyotaje”, however; we hope to problematize this narrative by adding a new theoretical layer to the discussion. Namely, we explore the ways in which different criminal activities produce hierarchies and control illicit activities within the clandestine geography of the US–Mexico border. These “illicit regimes” operate against the State, creating a hierarchy that dominates other illicit activities in order to maximize profit, avoid detection and consolidate power. While other studies have explored the relationships between the State and illicit practices this article takes the relationship between two illicit industries as its object of study. Doing so will help us move past the simply binary question about whether or not coyotes are involved with drug cartels, and allows us to understand what is being produced by this relationship, and its consequences for everyone involved.     

Illegality at Work: Deportability and the Productive New Era of Immigration Enforcement

Abstract: Our goal in this paper is to identify how recent escalations in immigration enforcement and changes in migration practices affect the ability of the state to continue to serve two of its key “productive” functions: protecting capital accumulation within industry and ensuring the state's own political legitimacy in the eyes of the public. We draw on our ethnographic research on Latino migrant dairy farm workers in Wisconsin to examine the ways in which a group of migrant workers experiences the process of being enforced as “illegal” bodies. We find that migrant dairy workers’ palpable sense of “deportability” articulates with the specific structure of dairy work in ways that make the economically and politically “ideal” migrant: compliant at work and invisible otherwise.     

Turning the Tide? Why Development Will Not Stop Migration

Restrictive immigration policies and the militarization of external border controls by the US and the EU have failed to significantly curb immigration from Latin America and Africa. Rather, they have led to greater reliance on increasingly risky and costly irregular migration and have paradoxically encouraged permanent settlement. A commonly presented ‘smart solution’ to curb immigration is to address the perceived root causes of migration through increasing aid or liberalizing trade with origin countries. Recently, policies to stimulate remittances and to promote temporary and circular migration have also been advocated as enhancing home country development, so that these forms of migration become a medicine against illegal and permanent migration. However, besides the limited scope and credibility of such policies, empirical and theoretical evidence strongly suggests that economic and human development increases people's capabilities and aspirations and therefore tends to coincide with an increase rather than a decrease in emigration, at least in the short to medium term. Under unfavourable conditions, trade, aid and remittances can be complements to, rather than substitutes for, migration also in the longer term. At the same time, demand for both skilled and unskilled migrant labour is likely to persist. Trade, aid, return migration and remittances are no short‐cut ‘solutions’ to migration, and sustained immigration therefore seems likely.     

Disjointed knowledges,obfuscated visibility. Border controls at the French-Italian Alpine border

This article deals with border controls at the French-Italian Alpine frontier which have been implemented to govern and contain the migrants in transit. It analyses border controls by focusing on the circulation of knowledge and the economy of visibility which are enacted at that frontier. The article illustrates how the French-Italian Alpine area has become a border-zone for migrants, showing that modes of knowledge and forms of visibility are constitutive of bordering processes. It moves on with a section on the production and circulation of knowledge at the border, introducing the notion of “disjointed knowledges” to account for the asymmetries and fragmentariness at play in border control activities. It argues that we need to start from the partial non-circulation of data and local frictions in order to understand bordering practices. Then, it engages with the obfuscated visibility produced on migrant crossing, drawing attention to how migrants’ presence at the border is alternatively visible and concealed by the authorities.     

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.     

Policy Climates,Enforcement Rates,and Migrant Behavior: Is Self‐Deportation a Viable Immigration Policy?

U.S. immigration policy has been the subject of considerable debate in recent years. Previous research has focused on how temporal variation in federal policy has altered the migratory behavior of immigrants. The effect of spatial variation in enforcement remains untested. Relying on the criminological distinction between general and specific deterrence, we argue that high rates of enforcement are unlikely to encourage undocumented immigrants to self‐deport. We also examine the effects cultural and economic immigration policies adopted by the states. Previous research suggests that migrants will choose to remain in states with favorable environments, but this claim has not been directly tested. We draw on data from the Mexican Migration Project (MMP) to address these gaps. MMP data are supplemented with government data on federal enforcement obtained from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and measures of state policy. Our findings suggest that higher rates of enforcement and the establishment of negative policy environments do not encourage undocumented immigrants to leave the United States at a higher rate than their documented counterparts do. Rather, high enforcement contexts exaggerate the differences between documented and undocumented migrant behavior, with undocumented migrants staying longer. Liberal state policies have no discernible effect.     

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.     

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.     

Neoliberalizing Border Management in Finland and Schengen

Abstract: This paper provides a critical examination of the development of border management in Finland and the Schengen Area, the point of departure being that contemporary performances of border enforcement and security cannot be understood as distinct from the process of neoliberalization. The particular case which is examined is that of the Finnish Border Guard (FBG) service. Border management in Finland provides an interesting case not only because Finland is responsible for controlling the Schengen, European Union–Russian border but also because since Finnish state reforms in the early 1990s, neoliberal rationales have increasingly provided the guidelines for how to calculate and optimize border security. This paper emphasizes that the rationales of border management should be made transparent and opened for public debate. The analysis is structured around the themes of internationalization, competitiveness, risk prevention and the functioning of society, all of which are regarded as the key rationales of neoliberalized border governance.     

Unwanted sea migrants across the EU border: The Canary Islands

In the early 2000s, the Canary Islands emerged as the main gateway for unwanted sea migrants from Senegal into Spain. In this paper, I draw from a year of multi-sited ethnographic work to discuss the relationship between state actions to secure the border against these migrants, on the one hand; and smugglers and migrants' efforts to subvert those actions, on the other. My argument is that the relationship between the two is mutually constitutive: anti-immigration policy is a reaction to the actions of unwanted migrants, and unwanted migrants adapt to state efforts to seal the border against unwanted migration by finding and exploiting spaces of opportunity in the border. In the context of sea migration from Senegal to the Canary Islands, 2005 marks a major shift in this relationship. That year the European Union adopted a new framework for migration control (the Global Approach to Migration and Mobility), Frontex became operational, and Spain and Senegal deepened their cooperation to stop unwanted Europe-bound sea migration. This forced unwanted migrants to find creative ways to enter EU territory. I argue that combining the institutional and migrant perspectives allows us to explore the decentering of the state in the contemporary anti-immigration border regime, the emerging spatialities of the contemporary border, and understand the migrant's journey. This perspective also illuminates the messiness, violence, and multiplicity of interests involved in the bordering of Europe.     

Practices of Illegalisation

This article contributes to theorising the often unrecognised continuities between the illegalisation of migrant and refugee mobilities as an effect of lawmaking or other state practices of border policing and immigration law enforcement and the illegalisation of the rights, claims, and juridical status of minoritised citizens. Against a backdrop of resurgent right-wing nationalisms, we pursue this transversal analysis of state practices of illegalisation to draw attention not only to labour subordination and disposability but also the more fundamental relationship between law and terror. The making of such regimes of citizenship takes place in obvious ways at the ostensible outer edges of nation-state territories. They are also replicated in the various spatial arrangements that ensure racialised dispossession within global cities, cities that are better understood as reconfigurations of settler-colonial cities. We argue that the study of practices of illegalisation allows critical poverty scholarship to better discern how sociopolitical categories and classifications that are central to wider processes of marginalisation and domination may arise or be reinforced as effects of the state’s legal productions of illegality.