Comment on Josiah Heyman’s “Capitalism and US policy at the Mexican border”

Abstract

Josiah Heyman, whose work on the Mexico–U.S. border in the 1990s and early 2000s has informed much of my own thinking on the concept of global apartheid, has written an essay that serves as an important starting point for engaging in a whole series of debates on the question of how nation-state boundaries operate within the contemporary capitalist world system. The great strength of the essay is the way in which it provides some much-needed texture and nuance to some of the conceptual arguments that scholars like Nandita Sharma and I, and, indeed, Heyman himself have made elsewhere. One of the great challenges that theoretically informed scholars committed to solid empirical work always face is balancing the need to keep their eye on the ‘‘big picture’’ of what is going on while simultaneously remaining faithful to representing on-the-ground realities in all their complexity. I applaud Heyman for his attempt to confront this challenge explicitly by asking us to reconsider conceptually how we characterize the capitalist principles according to which U.S. border policies presently are put into practice, given how this call for reconceptualization is based on his own and others’ empirical work on state border enforcement bureaucracies. Of particular importance to this endeavor, especially for practitioners of holistic social sciences such as anthropology and sociology, is Heyman’s explicit statement of the ever-obvious but too-often neglected truism that ‘‘[c]apitalism is not just a functional economic machine, but an entire reality of social inequality.’’ It is to a fine-grained analysis of this ‘‘entire reality’’ that Heyman calls our attention. One of the apparent contradictions in capitalist border policy and practice that Heyman contemplates in the essay is what he regards as the U.S. government’s substantial underinvestment in facilitating legal cross-border movements of persons and commodities through land ports of entry along the border with Mexico and