article summary

223

Geopolitics, 12:223–227, 2007 Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 1465-0045 print / 1557-3028 online DOI: 10.1080/14650040601168800

FGEO1465-00451557-3028Geopolitics, Vol. 12, No. 2, January 2007: pp. 1–9Geopolitics

Introduction: Borderline Contradictions: Neoliberalism, Unauthorised Migration, and Intensifying Immigration Policing

Borderline ContradictionsMonica W. Varsanyi and Joseph Nevins

GUEST EDITORS

MONICA W. VARSANYI School of Justice and Social Inquiry, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, USA

JOSEPH NEVINS Department of Geology and Geography, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York, USA

On 15 August 2006, Elvira Arellano, along with her seven-year-old son, Saúl, took refuge at Adalberto United Methodist Church in the Humboldt Park neighbourhood of Chicago, Illinois. Arellano had been arrested by immigration agents in December 2002 while at work as a cleaner of airplanes at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport for entering, working and residing in the United States without state sanction. She is, in other words, according to US authorities, an illegal alien.

Despite the arrest, Arellano was able to win on humanitarian grounds three temporary stays of deportation, allowing her to remain in Chicago through mid-2006 to provide care for her US citizen son. During that time, she became a prominent spokesperson for Illinois’ unauthorised immigrant population and the president of La Familia Latina Unida (the United Latino Family), a Chicago-based organisation which works with families potentially split by deportation.

But the stays of deportation ended. It was on the day that federal authorities ordered Arellano to appear at a local office of the Department of Homeland Security to be deported that she took up sanctuary at the church, challenging federal government to enter the church’s grounds and arrest her.

Her son has attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. Arellano wants Saúl to stay in the country of his birth – which effectively requires her to remain

Address correspondence to Monica W. Varsanyi, School of Justice and Social Inquiry, Arizona State University, P.O. Box 870403, Tempe, AZ 85287-0403, USA. E-mail: monica. [email protected]

224 Monica W. Varsanyi and Joseph Nevins

in the United States as well – to ensure that he has access to medical treat- ment better than he would were he in Mexico.

Arellano’s case has attracted a great deal of attention. She has won the support of many who see her as someone courageously standing up for the human rights of migrants, and earned the wrath of many others who perceive her as a law breaker for being in the United States without authorisation.1

Her defiance of US authorities has not yet led to her arrest – as least as of October 2006. Indeed, US officials have not entered the church and, according to one such official, have no intention of doing so. The Arellano case, he explained, carries “no more priority than any of the other 500,000 [non-US citizen] fugitives nationally”.2

That there are so many immigrant “fugitives” – along with many millions of “illegal aliens” – in the United States, especially at a time when immigra- tion and boundary policing has reached unprecedented levels and the calls for ever-greater levels of enforcement resonate with large sectors of the US public, speaks to many of the contradictions that this special issue addresses. In short, this (according to many) neoliberalising era is one of falling barriers to capital and rising walls to migrants – at least those who are officially undesired by the relatively wealthy, secure and powerful coun- tries of the world.

Nonetheless, as Elvira Arellano’s presence in Chicago and the support she enjoys illustrate, the rejected outsider is also very much “in.” This is hardly unique to the United States as the large numbers of unauthorised migrants who live and work in Europe, Israel, South Africa and elsewhere demonstrate.

These contradictions speak to the incredible persistence and resource- fulness of migrants and those who smuggle them – some unauthorised crossers of the US-Mexico boundary, for example, have resorted to using bicycles to cross the desert3 – as well as the power of resistance. This resis- tance is brought about in no small part by alternative ethical systems and related political-geographical imaginaries, as well as by the very humanity of migrants, whose neighbours in their country of destination often embrace them in ways that challenge the simple boundaries between “us” and “them”.4 In France, for example, large numbers of people have stepped for- ward publicly and vowed to hide migrant families with children who are under threat of deportation.5

These contradictions also speak to the difficulties – perhaps impossibilities – of disciplining and reducing people to policing agents of nationalism and its territorial expression. In the case of the US enforcement apparatus, many agents have succumbed to smugglers’ bribery (showing how susceptible they are to neoliberal logic), while some Border Patrol agents have been caught dating, loving and living with the very “illegals” they are charged with apprehending.6

Meanwhile, the neoliberalising forces of capital and their state allies con- tinue to encourage migrants to cross the strengthening territorial boundaries.

Borderline Contradictions 225

They do so, by among other means, disrupting socio-economic networks that undermine the ability of people to realise their livelihoods at “home,” and providing powerful employment magnets that attract migrants to go else- where.7 The viability of these “illegal” workers is greatly aided by, in the case of the United States, lax workplace enforcement by state authorities.8

This, combined with the very status of the migrants, helps to “produce” a worker of high “flexibility,” to employ a term much used by the champions of neoliberal policies.

Such flexibility often reflects migrants’ significant and multifaceted vul- nerability, one that frequently manifests itself in a lethal fashion within the increasingly policed border zones between the global North and South. To cite just one example, an estimated 1,700 migrants died in 2005 alone while trying to make the ocean voyage from the Western Sahara and Morocco to the Canary Islands of Spain,9 a tragic outcome which demonstrates the enduring and, in some ways, growing power of nationalism in a time also characterised by increasing globalisation.

The papers in this special issue of Geopolitics address these growing “borderline contradictions” from several critical perspectives. First, the authors frame their discussions of unauthorised migration within the context of neoliberalism: a contradictory process which encourages economic flows across international borders (for instance, favouring the accumulation of capital; defence of private property rights, free market and free trade, as dis- cussed by Carter and Merrill in this issue), while at the same time maintain- ing nationalistic political-geographic closure – at least to migrants deemed as undesirable – across those same borders via expanding boundary enforcement and militarisation. As the authors discuss, the ever-increasing movement of unauthorised migrants across national borders is an important manifestation of these contradictory processes of economic openness and territorial closure. This neoliberal contradiction is a manifestation of a con- tinued adherence to a territorially trapped vision of the nation-state,10 which as Carter and Merrill, and Nevins discuss in this issue, simultaneously neglects the global economic and structural roots of international migration, and therefore places the responsibility for unauthorised migration and the blame for the increasingly deadly consequences of these migration attempts on the shoulders of individual migrants. The unauthorised migrant is per- haps, therefore, the embodied evidence of the Janus-faced nature of the neoliberal state. Contrary to neoliberal discourses which profess and at times, celebrate, the “withering of the nation-state,” unauthorised migration demonstrates the way in which state policies enable an increasingly open economic system, while simultaneously maintaining control of the national territory. This contradiction is typified in the simultaneous enactment, in 1994, of the seemingly paradoxical, yet fundamentally complementary North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Southwest Border Control Strategy (SWBCS).

226 Monica W. Varsanyi and Joseph Nevins

As the papers in this issue also demonstrate, the border is a crucial site in which these contradictions are materialised. While we often think of the border as simply the site at which unwanted people and flows are policed and excluded from the national territory, the neoliberal border also serves other important functions. First, intensifying border policing “performs” national closure for a concerned citizenry in the post-9/11 era, as a response to concerns about and, at times, hysteria over national security and the threat of terrorism, via the material and discursive production of closure at the bor- der. And second, importantly, “the border” does not remain at the margins of the nation-state, but rather is woven throughout the territory of the nation by marking those who have crossed it without authorisation, and therefore delineating boundaries between insiders (citizens and others who have state authorisation to be in the national territory) and outsiders (those who do not belong). This internalisation of the border has the (un)intended effect of producing a marginalised and flexible working class, either through the pro- duction of illegality, as Varsanyi’s article discusses in the context of Mexican undocumented workers in the United States, or via the processing of return- ing overseas workers, as Silvey highlights in the context of Indonesia.

The impact of the neoliberal border extends beyond the production of a marginalised working class. As both Scarpellino’s and Kim’s papers contend, albeit from different perspectives, the mortal dangers involved with crossing this border without authorisation can be understood not as aberrations, but rather as the deeply structural results of broader political economic changes. Scarpellino talks about the dangers of the neoliberal, or “hard” border, as she calls it, as manifestations of structural violence – not perhaps, as visible as more commonly understood forms of violence, but a long-term and life- threatening deprivation nonetheless. From a different viewpoint, Kim under- stands the increasing number of deaths along these neoliberal borders as a form of “slow-onset humanitarian disaster” (see also, Nevins, in this issue). And while the potential impacts of the neoliberal border are grave for those who attempt to cross without authorisation, the production of this border is also having serious impacts on the communities which live along it. As Mad- sen’s paper illustrates, nowhere, perhaps, is this impact felt more directly than in the Tohono O’odham Nation, a Native American nation which strad- dles the US-Mexico border, and whose lands have become a major migrant smuggling route since the implementation of Operations Gatekeeper and Hold-the-Line in the mid-1990s, which have had the effect of pushing migrant crossings into the deserts of Arizona and New Mexico.

In light of the disciplining, punishing, and potentially deadly impacts of this neoliberal border, what is to be done? A number of the papers in this special issue offer potential pathways across these borderline contradic- tions. If the commodities and capital flow with increasing ease across inter- national boundaries, Kim’s paper proposes an unconventional solution to the dilemma of increasing migrant vulnerability which essentially fights fire

Borderline Contradictions 227

with fire. He proposes, in essence, that the migrant smuggling business should treat migrants as commodities and that the concept of escrow – an arrangement whereby a third party holds payment pending safe delivery of the migrants – could be used to ensure safe delivery of these “goods”. Var- sanyi’s paper engages not with the vulnerability of migrants as they cross the border, but with their stability once they are resident in the United States. She explores alternate forms of belonging and membership in the neoliberal context, through an examination of the increasing adoption of the matrículas consulares as an alternative form of identification for unau- thorised Mexican migrants in cities and counties across the United States. Scarpellino’s paper engages with the ethical dimensions of this hardened, neoliberal border, and drawing on theories of justice, concludes that the neoliberal border is a violation of human rights. And finally, while neoliber- alism has created a context in which international migration is seemingly the only way for many in the global South to survive, given the dangers of the neoliberal border as well as the production of a marginalised working class, Silvey questions the Indonesian state’s decision to promote overseas migration as a state-led development strategy in Indonesia.

NOTES

1. See Gretchen Ruethling, ‘Chicago Woman’s Stand Stirs Immigration Debate’, The New York Times (19 August 2006), available at http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=domesticNews&sto- ryID=2006-08-22T002121Z_01_N21200756_RTRUKOC_0_US-LIFE-USA-BICYCLES.xml.

2. Nathaniel Hernandez, ‘ICE Official Says Government Won’t Enter Church, Arellano Unconvinced’, Chicago Tribune (18 August 2006).

3. Reuters, ‘Mexico Migrants Use Cycles to Cross Arizona Desert’, (21 August 2006), available at http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2006-08-22T002121Z_01_ N21200756_RTRUKOC_0_US-LIFE-USA-BICYCLES.xml.

4. Molly Hennessy-Fiske, ‘Arkansas Immigration Raid Reaches Beyond Workers’, Los Angeles Times (23 July 2006).

5. Jamey Keaten, ‘Many French Seek to Block Deportations’, The Associated Press (19 June 2006). 6. Ralph Vartabedian, Richard A. Serrano and Richard Marosi, ‘Rise in Bribery Tests Integrity of

U.S. Border’, Los Angeles Times (23 October 2006); and Nicholas Riccardi, ‘Some Border Patrol Agents Take a Chance on Love’, Los Angeles Times (26 December 2005).

7. See, for example, Dale Russakoff, ‘U.S. Border Town, 1,200 Miles From The Border’, The Washington Post (17 July 2006) p. A01, available at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/ article/2006/07/16/AR2006071600665.html?nav=rss_politics.

8. See Spencer S. Hsu and Kari Lydersen, ‘Illegal Hiring Is Rarely Penalized’, The Washington Post (19 June 2006) p. A01.

9. Olivia Harris, ‘The Deadliest Voyage’, The First Post (15 September 2006), available at http:// www.thefirstpost.co.uk/index.php?menuID=2&subID=674.

10. John Agnew and Stuart Corbridge, Mastering Space: Hegemony, Territory, and International Political Economy (New York: Routledge 1994).