Y estábamos pasando el río cuando nos fusilaron con los
máuseres. Me devolví porque él me dijo: ‘Sácame de aquí, paisano, no me dejes.’
—Juan
Rulfo, El llano en llamas
On March
30 of this year, the National Border Patrol Council (NBPC) endorsed Donald
Trump, effectively backing his bid for the presidency of the United States. NBPC
president Brandon Judd heads the organization, which describes itself online as
“the exclusive representative of approximately 18,000 Border Patrol Agents and
support personnel assigned to the U.S. Border Patrol.” Judd himself published the
NBPC’s pro-Trump communiqué, asserting that “if we do not secure our borders,
American communities will continue to suffer at the hands of gangs, cartels and
violent criminals preying on the innocent. The lives and security of the
American people are at stake… There is no greater physical or economic threat
to Americans today than our open border.”
In
light of Judd’s predictable language, it is important to recall that the story
of the Mexican-US border dates far back in time and has quite a history unto
itself. The NBPC president’s decision to invoke gangs, cartels, and violent
criminals, moreover, amounts to little more than a very lazy way of commandeering
the polemics that currently inform border narratives. Judd’s language certainly
reinforces the credibility of the racist whitewashing of border history that dominates
the paradigms of millions of Americans today. For this reason, perhaps, it is
paramount to acknowledge that – given the actual political and natural
geography of today’s borderland –the US military authorities, border patrol
agents, and local law enforcement are to blame for an unchecked and unquestioned
campaign of terrorism, a racist agenda that continues to assail border
communities and their peoples.
Policy and profiling along the border
During
the first two decades of the 21st century, the institutional
practices of United States immigration officials have enhanced ethno-racial
profiling along the Mexican-US border. This deeper means of profiling is part and
parcel of an age-old history of borderland colonization, which has long supported
a reproducible kind of inequality that victimizes vulnerable border groups. As it
stands, immigration policy espouses to, over time, enhance the furtive nature of
America’s insidious immigration enforcement practices. It comes as no surprise that
the state does virtually nothing to assuage the anti-immigrant climate that
festers. So, immigrants of Mexican origin and “non-immigrant co-ethnics” must brave
the hateful fog. The American state is only happy to be complicit; it would
rather benefit from the growing racist sentiment, capitalizing on its nearly
unchecked ability to deepen militarization and surveillance without unmanageable
obstruction from public resistance and dissent. Such dystopian avarice for power
(practiced through hegemony) certainly speaks to the deeper fissures that
extend beyond racism and immigration; however, it still wreaks havoc on a great
number of border lives each and every day.
The
American people, whether expert social scientists or the uninitiated, have long
witnessed how immigration laws militarize communities to incredible extents,
thereby aggravating the institutionalized ethno-racial oppression that has
served elites for centuries. In fact, each day the state harasses (or worse)
workers and families all along the border. Such daily encounters can only be
categorized as “ordinary violence,” as they occur with such frequency that they
become normalized over time. The increasing militarization of the border itself
is obvious: Run-ins with immigration officials and police readily serve as
occasion to deploy military-level tactics and weaponry. A wealth of data
documents the unjust nature of ethno-racial profiling, abuse, and the
institutionalized victimization of US citizens and permanent residence of
Mexican descent in the borderlands. Many people have testified as to the
particulars of their experience with living in a bewilderingly militarized site.
Many have testified about law enforcement practices, which commonly indicate
that policy deliberately coincides with immigration-centric profiling and
harassment. The fact that racially- and ethnically-charged profiling and mistreatment
occurs in towns more so than in official ports of entry suggests predatory
policy has had quite the spillover effect.
Borderland
denizens endure physical, emotional, verbal, and psychological violence, much
of which stems from the overt mistreatment they suffer at the hands of
immigration officials. Run-ins with such authority – whether within communities
and towns or at ports of entry – adversely affect people who are simply
performing routine tasks, such as work, travel, shopping, and spending time
with friends and family. The America that these residents inhabit is unlike the
America that society’s privileged tend to enjoy. Because of this, researchers
have asked the border peoples affected by state violence and institutionalized
ethno-racial state-sponsored terror to document their perceptions of the
everyday oppression that they routinely face. “Excessive” is but one albeit sanitized
way to capture those feelings so that extra-border Americans may understand.
The type
of violent subjugation that continues to oppress vulnerable groups along the
border doubtless happens at the margins, and it is situated at a locus that researchers
describe as the “capillary level”—that is, where interactions that occur in
micro directly or indirectly reinforce violent norms. This is the selfsame
violence that serves to galvanize the structural racism which US immigration
policy requires in order to sustain its oppressive success along the border. It
is a manifestation of violence that is at once exploitative and oppressive, and
arguably the American state has spent centuries perfecting it. Even if it
manifests unknowingly, this violence stymies social growth and relationships by
degrading even the physical health of its victims. What is more, this kind of
ordinary, institutionalized violence is precisely where the ever-militarizing
state exacts its power over marginalized groups that have long suffered under
the thumb of the state and its elastic bouquet of violence and racism. It is
important to recognize, though, that there is hope to identify exactly where
the oppressive arm of the law continues to marginalize certain ethno-racial
groups – be they US citizens, permanent residents, or residents of Mexican
origin or descent – along the border.
A view to the past
In
order to establish a colonial system that would service their interests, the
Spanish exploited and oppressed indigenous peoples throughout the Americas. After
three centuries of such colonialism, social classes had become firmly institutionalized
in Mexico. Class depended on race, birthplace, and also the internalization of
racial inferiority. The Spanish even devised different kinds of systems (i.e., Hacienda and Encomienda) so as to regiment social order, marginalize, and
subjugate indigenous peoples. One salient point to be made about this time in
history, especially given relevance to the state-sponsored racial profiling
that occurs along the border today, is that the indigenous persons who appeared
to have a more European physiognomy might enjoy some of the elitist benefits that
Spanish colonialism had crafted in Mexico. On the other hand, however, those with
a more indigenous mien could hardly hope to ascend socially. Instead, they were
relegated to what colonial elites considered lesser social classes. Such racism
belongs to a five-hundred-year history in which people of Mexican origin,
including those along the border, suffered at the hands of the Spanish,
English, Portuguese, French, and Anglo-America and its government. Of course, all
of these were foreign powers and had much in common.
A cursory
peek back in time reveals that one of the most contentious issues in the
foreign policy of Andrew Jackson involved Texas and the Mexican government.
Pejoratively, historians have called the Mexico of this era the “sick man of
North America,” partly because the nation’s government practiced the aging
Spanish policy of inviting foreign settlers to move to Texas (so as to secure a
buffer between itself and an aggressive United States). Two ideological tools
the Mexican government employed to assimilate the American immigrants were the
precepts of Catholicism and the ideals of antislavery. And upon invitation,
Americans inundated the eastern portions of the territory that spanned San
Antonio and the Sabine River. These American settlers relocated in Texas by the
tens of thousands, and their outposts thrived. Whether or not they truly assimilated,
most of the new colonists professed their allegiance to the Mexican government.
By
and large the American settlers eschewed politics, though a group of dissidents
and agitators became increasingly active at the outset of the 1830s. Some have
described this group as demented, or filled “with schemes in their heads and
guns in their hands—fleeing justice, fleecing Indians, gambling with lands ,
and promoting shooting scrapes called revolutions.” It was a motley crew that
boasted slave smugglers like William Travis, and even the likes of a former
Tennessee congressman and dear friend of Jackson, Sam Houston. Together, they
called for the independence of Texas and its annexation by the US government.
They played a significant role in inciting the pending clash between Mexico
City and Washington that would become the Mexican-American War.
In
1848, the signing of The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the war that the US
had declared on Mexico. Article X, a key element of the treaty, was neglected; its
purpose was to protect the rights of Mexican citizens dwelling in lands that
Mexico ceded to the US. The treaty marked not only a loss of rights for
Mexicans but also the loss of virtually half of Mexican territory (i.e., California,
Nevada, parts of Utah, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, and Oklahoma). Mexicans caught
on the Yankee side of the border became a conquered group. Many were soon after
displaced from their lands, and those who remained in the United States and
gained citizenship after a year’s time were considered to be Mexican Americans.
Whether Mexican or Mexican American, all faced immense discrimination and exploitation
principally as a means of cheap labor. This was not entirely dissimilar to the
indigenous groups of colonial Mexico. To ensure economic supremacy along racial
and ethnic lines, Mexicans and Mexican Americans were not enfranchised with the
same political and land rights as whites, or Anglos.
During
subsequent times of economic downturn, the American state has scapegoated
Mexicans and Mexican Americans. And during times of economic boom, the same
people have been treated as cheap and expendable sources of labor. If people of
Mexican origin could not present documentation of US citizenship, they were
subjected to deportation. Mexican Americans, on the other hand, were forced to
study in segregated (or Mexican) schools, lived in segregated neighborhoods,
and were viewed as “lesser than” the Anglos. America’s social science community
launched a readied assault on Mexican Americans and their culture by propagating
so-called “cultural deficit models.” These propagandized models categorized and
assessed Mexicans to be “passive,” “irrational,” “unscientific,” “masochistic,”
“apathetic,” “fatalistic,” “lazy,” “lacking initiative,” and liable to act in “criminal”
ways. An attack on Mexican culture ensued and was decried the root cause of
Mexican Americans’ so-called “social pathologies.” Anglo society largely prescribed
assimilation by English-only education as the cure. They believed Mexicans and
Mexican Americans were deficient in the cultural values necessary for economic
success. The need to assimilate Mexicans and Mexican Americans into
Anglo-American society was thus taken for granted.
Lynchings
A century
ago, in 1916, a Wisconsin newspaper remarked: “That there are still lynchings
in the far west, especially along the Mexican border, would hardly seem to be
open to question, although they escape the average collector of statistics. The
subject is one that invites searching inquiry.” For more than eighty years, from
1848 to 1928, systemic analysis failed to assess the lynching of Mexicans that
took place in the United States. There was very little scholarly concern for
Mexican lynchings during this time, and the resultant models that sought to
explain the mob violence that Mexicans suffered did not really exceed the
narrower, racial focus on blacks in the South. A conservative estimate finds
that nearly 600 Mexican lynchings took place between 1848 and 1928 in the US. Historians
put forth this number with a word of caution: the definition of lynching has
changed so much over time that an accurate collection of mob violence data is
practically impossible. Used here, the term “lynching” indicates an act of
murder that is retributive and/or committed by a person or persons claiming to
act on behalf of the interests of justice, tradition, and the community or
common good. Even despite all efforts towards a working definition of lynching,
a precise count of Mexican victims is generally considered impossible to
render.
Mexican
and Mexican Americans lived under the threat of lynching during the last half
of the 19th century and during the first half of the 20th,
and lynching was very much a part of the ordinary violence of the day. Some
historians suggest that from 1882 to 1930 the likelihood of Mexicans becoming mob
violence murder victims was comparable to that of murder victims who were African
Americans. For African Americans living in Alabama during this time, the rate of
the violence in question exceeded 32 persons for every 100,000; in South and
North Carolina, the rate exceeded 18 and 11 persons (respectively) for every
100,000. For Mexicans during this time, the figure exceeded 27 persons per
100,000. And from 1848 to 1879, Mexican lynchings occurred at a rate of 473 for
every 100,000 person population sample.
Compared
to a rate of 53 for every 100,000 person population sample of African American
victims from 1880 to 1930, a period considered by scholars to be the period
most replete with mob violence in the “lynch-prone” South, the mob violence
Mexican faced was still unparalleled. And just as historians argue that the act
of lynching is vital to understanding the African American experience in US
history, they likewise note that the history of lynching is important for the Mexican
and Mexican American experience. Lynchings took place most commonly in the four
southwestern states—where Mexicans were most concentrated there and in the
largest number. The history of Mexican lynching in the US is rarely talked
about and is certainly a significant chapter in the western history of white
(Anglo) expansion and conquest.
Blood latitudes and frontier violence
Traditionally,
the extra-legal violence of frontier vigilantism has been considered a product
of the inability of government and legal institutions to keep pace with the
rapid evolution of the frontier itself. Historians have maintained that, in
lieu of the absence of legal entities and powers, frontier folks had no choice
but to take control of matters and assume a role of legal authority: hence the
validation of vigilantism as a legitimate means of settling the American West
through violence, and hence the depiction of such vigilantism as a legitimate
means of preserving a tenuous means of order and security throughout frontier
communities. At times, this vigilantism has been credited with paving the way
for a proper legal system. One historian even touts frontier vigilantism as a positive
element of the American experience: “Many a new frontier community gained order
and stability as the result of vigilantism that reconstructed the community
pattern and values of the old settled areas, while dealing effectively with
crime and disorder.” There is no doubt that conditions on the frontier allowed
for the coming about of vigilantism; nevertheless, the conventional
interpretation of western violence and vigilantism along the frontier cannot be
successfully applied to the Mexican lynchings.
A
major problem is that the civic virtue of vigilantes is taken for granted. The
guilt of their victims is also considered to be implicit. Even so, the popular
tribunals that condemned Mexicans to death were all but virtuous and seldom
adhered to any “spirit of the law.” Whites (Anglos) refused to qualify courts
of law when Mexicans either controlled or influenced them. And in order to
restore the equilibrium of political (and racial) power, they established their
own means of justice. For example, in 1880s Socorro, New Mexico, an Anglo “vigilance
group” manifested itself, and mainly in opposition to Mexican legal authority. Nor
did these groups show much respect for the legal rights of Mexicans when they executed
them—and in numbers that were disproportionately large. Such vigilantism can
hardly count for little more than makeshift institutionalized racism and
discrimination, a kind of attitudinal cocktail that predates today’s border
militarization and the ordinary violence that accompanies now it. Consider, moreover,
the fact that little more than ten percent of the nearly 600 Mexican lynching
victims were killed by organized vigilante committees. The overwhelming
majority of these victims were “summarily executed” by means of mob violence
and the outright denial of a trial. Mexicans were sequestered from courtrooms
and jail cells and then executed. So, in no way, shape, or form did these mobs act
in the interest of upholding the law; instead, they acted out of a depraved
desire to satisfy their penchant for racist prejudice against racial and ethnic
minorities.
A kind of border
It is
not merely an unforeseen irony that Mexicans and Mexican border entrants would
be forced to assume the moniker of “terrorist” and suffer a contrived
association with international terrorism in the 21st century. Border
security, which the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001 pushed to the fore,
can be clearly but partly understood as a socially created concept whose political
environment contours its significance. This extends to the US-Mexican border,
the American state, and border history, beginning with Spanish imperialism.
Taken together, reframing the border and its entrants as a cohort of people who
pose myriad potential terror threats cannot, in any honest way, be situated in
an objective sense of reality. Instead, border security is very much a
contrived sort of specter, something endogenous to the socio-political
construction of the border itself. Clearly, then, something as pressing as border
security belongs to a deep-seated history of extra-legal violence,
militarization, exploitation, and murder. This is the kind of border that has
been carved into maps and inked with the blood of thousands of innocent victims.
Though
the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the 1853 Gadsden Purchase combined to create
what is now the Mexican-US border, it was not until 1924 that the US increased
its borderland military presence via the creation of the Border Patrol. Afterwards,
in the 1930s, an economic slump would and anti-Mexican attitudes would combine to
foment mass deportations of Mexican people. These deportations carried on even into
the 1950s, thanks to “Operation Wetback.” Today, the safeguards afforded us by
Homeland Security along the US-Mexican border continue what is the now
centuries-old propensity of the American state to wage physical and
psychological violence against Mexican Americans, immigrants of Mexican origin,
and other non-immigrant co-ethnics. Such aims are visible through policy and
terrorist tactics like “Operation Hold the Line,” or “Operation Safeguard.”
Rampant civil rights violations of groups – Mexicans, Mexican Americans, Native
Americans, etc. – have been plainly documented.
The
American state has, through subjugation and repression, engendered a model of
internalized colonialism in the Southwest. The characteristics of this model
are fairly recognizable and harken back to a time when imperial Spain busied itself
with colonizing the Americas on behalf of the economic elites in Iberia. The
hallmarks of the model currently afoot are: the exploitation of people for the
sake of cheap and/or expendable labor; the dispossessing of people of their land;
the gerrymandering of voting districts; and the treating of people as
“conquered” in order to serve the economic and political interests of the
greater American society. A century-and-a-half of Anglo America’s
neocolonialism has led to the conquest, the occupation and the subsequent subjugation
of two-thirds of what was Mexico. In turn, Mexican-American landowners, workers
and laborers and others throughout the southwest have experienced the ethnocentric
discrimination and racist militarization of police forces and Department of
Homeland Security surveillance reach its zenith in the 21st century.
Effectively, the US model of colonial internalization has become very much a
successful, and ongoing, project.
Parasitic
opportunists working in Washington have certainly made their contributions to
the present mess of things. And while in the material world immigration and
crossing the border is a very real thing, the nature of immigration and border
security is steeped in the political processes that political elites, security alarmists,
and bureaucratic actors who have long sought to entrench themselves (to their
personal benefit) in the wake of the Cold War. They took absolute advantage of the
longstanding conflicts in national and ethnic identities and the attitudes that
people have held toward migrants. They preyed on people’s perceptions of migrants
in order to construct state policy that would elevate the security threat that
border entrants posed to that posed by terrorist. No doubt these political
actors, who were so deep within the American state, did all this just to stay
behind the curtain, pulling the levers of America’s political machinery in the twilight
of the Cold War.
Clinton gets serious about the border
October
of 2000 marked the eighth year of America’s attempt to enhance border
enforcement. The goal was basically to gain control of and minimize
unauthorized immigration across the US-Mexican border. Beginning in 1993, two
shifts in policy made this experiment possible. To start, the young Clinton
administration decided it was time to take border enforcement “seriously,” an
attitude that manifested itself in a sustained increase in the Immigration and
Naturalization Service (INS) budget—namely, the money allotted to enforcing the
border. By 2003, the Clinton administration’s actions had made INS the largest federal
law enforcement agency after the FBI. The second thing the Clinton
administration did was to concentrate along a small number of short border
segments the new resources it was making available to border control. These
segments, or corridors, happened to be the most frequently used passages
amongst would-be unauthorized migrants.
Also
in 1993, the Clinton administration and its Office of National Drug Control
Policy sponsored an investigation to find new kinds of methods that would up
border security. The federal government specifically supported Sandia National
Laboratories, which performs research in service of the military. Findings
suggested that the Border Patrol would be best-suited by focusing on entry
prevention. This meant determent rather than apprehension along the border,
including within the US interior. Researchers that examine this development in
Clinton’s border policy consider it the point of inception for
“prevention-through-deterrence,” which the INS assumed as its general operating
procedure. And to ensure a difficult entry, Clinton would take the Sandia
report’s advice on making entry more arduous by fixing numerous physical
barriers and “advanced” electronic and surveillance technology.
During
this time, Silvestre Reyes, a Democratic Congressman and the region’s Border
Patrol supervisor, espoused a kind of border security enforcement plan for his
area. He planned for Border Patrol agents to space themselves and their
vehicles ever so far apart along the Rio Grande. The plan was for them to perpetually
intimidate potential entrants. The INS was not ecstatic about this plan but nonetheless
supported it and realized dramatic outcomes in the short run: Apprehensions
dropped by more than 75 percent during the 1994 fiscal year. Yet, one scholarly
study concluded that this border initiative in El Paso accounted for the
deterrence of mainly “commuter migrants” living in the adjoining Mexican city
of Juarez who tended to commuted on foot every day to service jobs. These were
not the long-distance entrants from deep within the Mexican interior that the
INS and Border Patrol agents had envisioned preventing from moving past El Paso
and its urban center.
Unsurprisingly,
the US government did not wait for any serious evaluation of this or INS
statistics regarding apprehensions in following years. Instead, congresspersons,
local authorities, and the mass media extolled the success of the experiment in
El Paso. The INS was then under formidable pressure to replicate the process in
San Diego and other principal entrances into the US. In effect, the experiment
in El Paso prompted a chain reaction that affected decisions in policy, the
adoption of certain strategies (i.e., “concentrated border enforcement”), and
so on. Some noteworthy details include: the addition of thousands more Border
Patrol agents in specific areas; portable and stationary high-intensity stadium
lighting; ten-foot-tall steel fencing fashioned out of Vietnam-surplus
helicopter landing mats; stationary and mobile infrared night scopes; thermal
imaging technology to physically map and locate entrants; remote video
surveillance systems with links to ground sensors that trigger automatic video
camera surveillance; new roads along the border; and a new biometric scanning
computer system known as “IDENT,” which would photograph and capture
fingerprints and biographical data and date and location of entrant
apprehension.
Increased border enforcement and the consequences
At
the turn of the millennium, several authors had published on US-Mexican border security
policy. The sketches they rendered more or less agreed with each other. Accordingly,
the American state gravitated towards specific local initiatives towards the
end of the 1970s and 1980s in its efforts to stem narcotics and entrants from
crossing the border. Also, the state was able to engender a much more sweeping
and ambitious campaign that, during the early 1990s, would allow the country to
boast that it had effectively sealed international border. The corresponding
regulation cost billions. It materialized in boots on the ground, “high
technology,” and lukewarm security measures like fences. Policymakers leaned on
the then-dominant mythos surrounding the power of technology and manpower and
how such power warranted a faith in the US government to be able to effectively
secure its borders and firmly maintain them under control. It should escape
none who read this that such developments invariably conjured tension between
the neoliberal global economic strategy to de-border the world, and the intense
geopolitical penchant for enacting and enforcing effective border security
measures.
Though
they successfully redirected the physical migration of border entrants, US
border enforcement tactics also significantly increased the physical risk, as
well as the cost, which to this day coincides with “crossing” and entry. It is absurd
to think that increased physical danger, as a result from concentrated border
enforcement, are merely unintended consequences of policy and militarization
decisions that the American state has opted for. In fact, such tactics as
“prevention through deterrence” were
always integral to the INS’ strategy on the border. To increase physical risk,
the likelihood of apprehension, and the cost of crossing the border, the INS
squarely expected to dissuade border entrants simply to go back home, a logic
that would only sink in after the death toll rose.
Since
the early 1990s, this strategy has affected a large amount of people on
multiple levels. It has made for a lucrative business in terms of human
trafficking, as prices that coyotes (people-smugglers)
charge have skyrocketed relative to which corridor they are working and the
services they pretend to offer migrants. Since the mid 1980s, coyote fees had been on the rise, and INS
protocol and Border Patrol policy and practices only strengthened that trend. In
terms of the Mexico-US border market, human traffickers had yet to price
themselves out at the turn of the millennium. And this is a service that – regardless
of the economic strains that it placed on migrants who had to save and borrow
in order to finance their lengthy and costly trip – predated the border
enforcement policy INS and Border Patrol that began in the 1990s.
Yet
another trend that predated 90’s border enforcement policy was the rate of
permanent settlement amongst “undocumented migrants” in the US. Again, the
INS/Border Patrol strategy seems only to have accelerated that trend, too! During
this period, which is one of much more stringent border enforcement, studies
show through multivariate analysis that the combination of border enforcement
and experiences with human trafficking lowered the probability for people to
return to their country of origin. This was especially true of Mexican males. Besides
these correlations, another serious consequence was the drastic increase in
migrant deaths.
Mexican
consulates on the Southwest border reported that from 1994-2001, roughly 1,700
people died while attempting to gain entry into the US. It was not until 1998,
however, that the Border Patrol began to systematically assemble statistics on
border-crossing deaths, which in some ways is gloomily reminiscent of the
counting problem in Mexican lynchings from over a century prior to all this. Reports
show that at least 1,000 migrants died from 1997-2001 alone. If one considers
the increase in border enforcement intensification in Arizona, California, and
Texas from 1994-2000, one sees that the incidence in migrant deaths increase
instep with the upping of border security in those same years. Again, as with
the lynchings of the mid-18th to early-19th centuries,
the available numbers grossly understate the quantity of actual deaths along
the border; the under-reporting of migrant bodies by the Border Patrol and also
Mexican officials speak to the tragic reality that countless bodies lie
unrecovered and strewn across miles and miles of mountain and desert along the
border. Needless to say, this is in part the result of an increase in the
militarization of the border, which evermore pushed migrants into remote and
deadly areas.
The border and transnational social trauma
Much
of the poetic language that surrounds the Arizona, California, New Mexico, and
Texas deserts seems to all but soften the pernicious policy that has consigned
so many to an shameful death within those deserts. The language, curiously
enough, speaks of the deserts
claiming lives. Though the scientific truths about human lives perishing in
extreme conditions are not in question here, it is imperative to recognize how
they are used to paper over the fact that the violent war on migrants and
border entrants is anything but an “unfortunate consequence” of a misguided
decision to cross in the first place.
What
is less tolerable is the attitude that some have apropos the fatal crossings,
which they countenance as migrants’ “just deserts” for breaking the immigration
laws of the American state. In both cases, the underlying – and highly
erroneous – premise is that private, insular decisions, which exist in a
virtual social vacuum, are alone responsible for informing the individual
decision to cross. It is a premise that so infuriatingly ignores the
intersectionality of the economic, the political, the social, the cultural—the
endless forces that render impossible any tenable notion of a solitary choice
on the part of the migrant or border entrant. Considering the standard of
border militarization, the criminal state actions that force migrants into
lethal geographies, the international history of borderland vigilantism and
violence, and the phony self-promotion of the neoliberal state’s ability to
solve these problems, it is impossible to blame the victims.
The
militarization of the border indicates that, within the bounds of the social
imagination at work in the US, folks believe enough security at the border will
stem the “tide” of border entrants and migrants that cross every day. The
militarization of the border speaks to an that many in the US live and breathe
in the political sphere, and it is an attitude that favors an insulated, prosperous
nation-state free of terrorist threats, no matter how imaginary. The fruits of
such a secure state belong principally to those for whom it is their natural,
“God-given” birthright. The solution, many of these folks imagine, requires reversing
the flow of people who cross at the border, which in turn requires the
militarization of the border via the deployment of armed forces, a wall and
taller fences, more advanced technology, and minimal military schemes. Never
mind the fact that these tiny efforts would do virtually nothing to stop the
other 40-to-50 percent of migrants who, during the first decade of the new
millennium, say, joined the US population in myriad other ways. The staying
power of immigration discourse has largely been that it makes a powerful
cultural appeal to an increased militarization of the border, which many
(albeit illogically) conclude is the only
feasible and immediate solution to the “problem.” But these hasty sorts of
higgledy-piggledy rationalizations are about as well thought out as the
extra-legal violence of borderland vigilantism of a century ago.
Borderlands
residents have felt the effects of political border strife in times recent and
past. Officials have increased the general level of alert. They have
intensified the physical scrutiny of the border area, and they have stymied
commerce and trade, even dampening local economies at times. Now, the
saturation of inescapable run-ins with immigration officials (including the
local law enforcement who enact policy pertaining to immigration and border
enforcement through military-like tactics and arms) is precisely what has
oppressed the border, its people, and its unfolding history with what can only
be described as excessive force and undue militarization. Researchers have
shown that borderland communities experience feelings of being “under siege.” Encounters
with law enforcement may occur anywhere: public or private spaces; formal or
informal checkpoints. Abuse and detention may be arbitrary, and identity inspection
may be discretionary. Yet, there will always be the needlessly oppressed whose
identity and citizenship will be targeted for racist reasons that belong to a
racist history.
The
target groups of border militarization and enforcement only grow suspicious and
distrustful of both the authority and the institutions of the American state.
And who can blame them? Coping strategies likely include silence and the
minimization of victimization, while the social psychological detriments, among
other injuries, include internalized trauma, manifest stress, anxiety, and
devastating mental/physical health conditions. The fear of reprisal and
criminalization is also a real outcome, and the state actively works to usurp
conduits of resistance to human rights violations, which is, and has always
been, detrimental to the health of borderlands denizens. Ultimately, in the
minds of the general American public, border security remains fixed in the
heart of immigration reform. What is not so widely accepted, however, is the
fact that securitization and militarization has already made it impossible for
folks to exist without the constant threat of police-state harassment,
especially that made manifest by immigration and local law enforcement. Another
problem is that US immigration policy sanctions anti-democratic practices like
ethno-racial profiling, harassment, discrimination, and other kinds of
structural racism and ordinary violence.
Indeed, out in the desert the enemy
cries wolf while stalking its true prey with a badge and a gun.
Mateo Pimentel is an Axis of Logic columnist, living on the US-Mexico border. Read the Biography and additional articles by Axis Columnist Mateo Pimentel.
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