Border Enforcement Research Articles

Failing through: European migration governance across the central Mediterranean

ABSTRACT Both today and under Gaddafi’s authoritarian rule, externalised migration controls have played a crucial role in EUropean irregular mobility governance across the Central Mediterranean. Offloading migration management on Tripoli is puzzling due to the fragility of its institutions, the ill-preparedness of its security forces, and widespread abuse against migrants. Why have European member states and EU institutions relapsed to relying on Libyan forces to govern irregular migration? In this paper, we argue that the EU has failed through the migration crisis in the Central Mediterranean by drawing on already established albeit ineffective and contentious policy tools. The collapse of Libya’s state apparatus, European Court of Human Rights’ censure of Italy’s illegal pushbacks and public opinion pressure temporarily displaced but did not fundamentally change EUrope’s restrictive approach to irregular mobility governance. While some new and less restrictive border enforcement policies were developed in response to the soaring death toll, this humanitarian turn was short-lived. By combining the mechanism of failing forward with institutionalist insights, our concept of failing through explains why the EU and its member states soon backslid into pre-existing institutional arrangements like bilateral agreements with Libyan authorities notwithstanding their problematic legal, ethical and political implications.

Categorising anti-asylum Seeker Sentiment through a Regime of Securitisation

ABSTRACT In this paper, we reveal three classes of asylum seeker sentiment in the Australian population. The first group are pro-asylum seekers who think Australians should help refugees, that government agencies should not be turning back boats carrying people seeking asylum, that immigration levels are low, and that current government policy is too tough. The second group are anti-asylum seekers who strongly disagree with helping refugees and people seeking asylum, and support a tough border policy. A third group are pro-government policy but largely sympathetic to refugees and people seeking asylum. We explain the demography and attitudes of these three groups using the theory on border securitisation. The securitisation actions and discourse position people seeking asylum as a threat. This has received widespread public endorsement. This is an empirical reflection of over two decades of influential Australian government discourse of antipathy towards refugees and asylum seekers. Successive Australian governments have tied those seeking asylum who arrive by boat with strict border enforcement policies that target people seeking asylum as a security threat to be repelled from the Australian mainland. This largely negative discourse has supported the merits of tough border controls. However, this discursive campaign has not entirely eradicated sympathy towards refugees and asylum seekers.

Coyotaje, Corruption, and Border Enforcement in “Ambos Nogales” in the 1930s

In the 1930s, agents from Mexico’s secret intelligence agency began to investigate reports of collusion between a Mexican coyote named Ramón Preciado, U.S. border agents, and U.S. government officials. Migrants and residents of Nogales, Sonora, accused the man of extorting migrants, sexually assaulting women, and reporting migrants to the Border Patrol. In turn, Border Patrol agents would deport those migrants who refused to pay bribes to Preciado. However, U.S. consular officials described him as a friend of the government, an advisor, and a trusted partner. This article uses this case to illustrate how corruption in migration agencies on both sides of the border allowed migrant smuggling to flourish as a profitable business in the twin border cities of Nogales, Sonora and Nogales, Arizona. Meanwhile, both U.S. officials and coyotes profited from the deportation of migrants, and the nascent Border Patrol used these inflated numbers to champion the success of its agents in guarding the border.

Border Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights: A Look at New Zealand

Border Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights: A Look at New Zealand

Captivity, Life and Death at the Nation’s Edge: Two Christian Visions of the U.S. Immigrant Detention Regime

Contemporary U.S. border enforcement involves more than the exclusion of immigrants. It also involves the extraction of profits from those held captive at the border line. Recast as “bodies” to fill “bed space” in dealings between ICE and private prisons, detained people experience multiple levels of suspension: between nations, between legal statuses, and between states of life and death. The testimonies of two Christian leaders who have ministered to those in detention reveal contrasting visions of life, death, and salvation that alternately occlude and shed light on the material realities of immigrant detention. For Timothy O’Dell, former national Director of Chaplaincy for CoreCivic, incarceration is a transformative experience that can prompt individuals to seek salvation in the hereafter. For Diana Ramos, an asylum-seeker who ministered to her peers while held at CoreCivic’s Eloy Detention Center, the harrowing realities of detention catalyzed moments of this-worldly healing, fueled by imagery of liberation.

The Border at Work: Undocumented Workers, the ILGWU in Los Angeles, and the Limits of Labor Citizenship

Abstract In 2000, the AFL-CIO officially embraced the call for amnesty for undocumented immigrant workers, reversing long-standing policy in favor of greater restriction and border enforcement. The roots of this new approach stretched back to the 1970s, when the growing presence of undocumented workers in the industrial workforce challenged organized labor's nationalist orthodoxy. Taking the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) in Los Angeles as a case study, we show how one union confronted new demographic and organizing realities and recognized the demand for unionization among new immigrants. Radical community organizers, legal advocates, and union organizing staff created a practice of labor citizenship, the recognition of the immigrants’ right to remain by virtue the demand for their labor. The promise of belonging through organizing and collective bargaining was limited by state power and the structural weakness of organized labor in the emerging neoliberal economy. Nevertheless, ILGWU campaigns trained a cohort of organizers that would become central to the union upsurge in Los Angeles during the 1990s.

¿Por qué Quédate? Frontiering through development in Guatemala

Across the global south, regimes of labour and mobility control are reforming that attempt to manage the northern movement of people. By combining financing development projects with explicit forms of border enforcement (including border personnel training and new securitization technologies), western governments and southern elites attempt to encourage publics (invariably poorer people of colour) to stay in local regions, rather than seek better livelihoods elsewhere. By reference to the USAID funded Centros Quédate or Stay Here Centres in Guatemala, this paper explores the merging of development and migration governance regimes through the concept of “frontiering through development.” The paper argues that initiatives such as these fail to consider the root causes of colonialism and imperialism that have long led people to migrate in the first place. Moreover, migration is cast as something problematic under discourses of populist economic nationalist sentiment, rather than beneficial to migrants, country-of-origin and destination regions. However, rather than passive recipients of patronising development, I show how participants rework the Quédate programme to fit their own onward goals. Paternalist development paradigms should take into account how crucial and embedded mobile livelihoods are in present-day realities.

2021 Harrell-Bond Lecture, Refugee Studies Centre, Oxford: Empire’s Refugees

Abstract International law offers us a story that naturalizes the selective evacuation of US, UK and other nationals from Afghanistan in 2021, and perhaps even renders benevolent their discretionary selection of Afghans who assisted with the occupation. In general, advocacy on behalf of refugees and migrants takes the form of expanding legal exceptions to the enforcement of borders, or pushing for the enforcement of existing exceptions found in international refugee law. In this lecture I propose greater attention to the operation of empire in relation to borders, and the treatment of refugees and asylum seekers in the case of Afghanistan and others like it. I argue that an empire-centric lens forces attention on structural, geopolitical domination and subordination typically obscured by individualized persecution-based determinations of asylum. It also positions refugees and migrants as political agents with powerful demands of sovereign accountability rather than as vulnerable, if sympathetic, claimants. I also posit that empire-centric accounts may have greater potential for mobilizing different politics within imperial nation-states, politics that would put pressure on these states either to curb imperial intervention and domination, or at the very least take greater responsibility for the worlds they destroy and create.

Deaths, disappearances, borders: Migrant disappearability as a technology of deterrence

This paper analyses migrant disappearances in connection to EU bordering practices and techniques. Drawing on fieldwork in various localities at Greek borderlands, I argue that death or disappearance, due to drowning, hypothermia, exhaustion, violence, deprivation of medical care, and road accidents, to name but a few examples, has become an integral part of border enforcement in the Global North. To engage analytically with such an instantiation of border violence, I propose to utilise the notion of migrant disappearability. This disappearability is a produced condition (as opposed to accidently or randomly appearing) of everyday existence that does not necessarily lead to death or disappearance but, nevertheless, exerts pressure towards certain kind of precarities and threats by limiting the horizon of possibilities racialised migrants from the Global South have ahead of them. Furthermore, the state of being disappearable is a social space one constantly enters, leaves, re-enters and leaves again; rather than being at the forefront at all times, it looms above like a ghost.

“Los Hijos Son La Riqueza Del Pobre:” Mexican Child Migration and the Making of Domestic (Im)migrant Exclusion, 1937–1960

Abstract This article expands upon adult-centric migration histories by analyzing the international and domestic migration of Mexican youth to and within the United States, mainly in the post–World War II period. It uncovers an overlapping set of far-reaching legal regimes composed of federal child labor regulations, state residence requirements, compulsory school attendance and border enforcement policies that jeopardized the welfare of all border-crossing Mexican youth, making even US–born children of immigrants subject to a domestic form of migrant exclusion. Through an examination of geographically disparate and neglected archival records, this article makes the case that an expansive view of national (im)migrant exclusion can account for overlooked injuries to child welfare and unique mechanisms of expulsion. Beyond deportation, exclusion in mid-twentieth-century America relied upon domestic forms of removal to exclude citizen and non-citizen migrant youth from public schools and relegate them to isolated sites of agricultural labor exploitation and incarceration.

Managing Security and Immigration at the U.S.–Mexico Border: A Foucauldian Perspective

ABSTRACT This paper investigates the dual, yet contradictory roles of freedom and restriction that public administration plays at the U.S.–Mexico border. The state bureaucracy allows for the free circulation of capital and goods while it routinely limits the movement of people. Michel Foucault’s neoliberal state and his notion of governmentality as a unique type of rational governing practice shed light on this apparent dichotomy. This theoretical framework helps account for border enforcement as a part of a much larger political-economy phenomenon. Managerialism as neoliberal ideology falls short of its promise to reduce governmental functions, creating instead a massive bureaucratic presence in the border region. The latter’s pervasive emphasis on surveillance and discipline of human beings crossing the border holds little to no public accountability. Ethnographic research is vital to shed light on the blank spot in public administration and management in this region – public officials’ discretionary judgement in specific border-crossing situations.

Migration, Borders and “De-bordering” in Pandemic Times: Voices as Interlocution from Quarantine Ships in Italy

ABSTRACT The Covid-19 pandemic has deeply affected the configuration of border regimes worldwide, resulting in further selective restrictions to individual cross border mobilities. The Mediterranean space, where sea-crossings have been a structural part of migration for over two decades, has been targeted by multidimensional and transversal re-bordering policies: from externalization to search and rescue, from asylum to detention. The “unsafe harbour strategy” and the resulting implementation of offshore isolation, de facto detention, on quarantine ships were key components of these re-bordering policies. These strategies have prevented a number of potential refugees from accessing asylum, thereby reinforcing the so-called hotspot approach. Combining traditional qualitative research methods with digital ethnographic research on “quarantine ships” in Italy, this paper explores migrants' reactions and responses to border enforcement via offshore isolation. By focusing on the voices emerging from quarantine ships, and on the subsequent interlocution between different actors and stakeholders, we highlight the emergence of various forms, tools and strategies of debordering. These are the outcome of the ongoing interaction between confined migrants, civil society stakeholders and the “onshore” world. We eventually discuss the implications of these interlocutions for research on the interplay between bordering and de-bordering in migration management and control.

Airpower and Migration Control

ABSTRACT Migration scholarship has thus far largely neglected the role of aircraft in both (irregular) migration and state policies aimed at controlling migration. Drawing inspiration from the field of strategic studies, where ‘airpower’ has been a key theoretical concept, this article explores the role of aerial assets in states’ migration control efforts. The article discusses three main dimensions of the use of airpower in controlling migration: the increasing resort to aircraft for border enforcement purposes – or what can be referred to as ‘vertical border policing’ –, states’ tight monitoring of the aerial migration infrastructure, and the use of aircraft in migrant return operations. As a core element of state power, it is airpower’s key features of reach, speed and height which have made it a particularly useful migration control instrument.

Race, Algorithms, and the Work of Border Enforcement

This article uses border modernization programs, including the Automated Virtual Agent for Truth Assessments in Real-Time (AVATAR) and the Secure Border Initiative Network (SBInet), to examine how race and labor have been central to high-tech border enforcement strategies. While I discuss specific technologies and programs, I am less interested in the machines and much more concerned with the work they allow humans to do. By “work” I mean the epistemic and manual labor that is required to imagine, produce, and use border enforcement technologies. I integrate approaches from critical ethnic studies and geography to broaden how the mostly white fields of STS (science and technology studies) and military studies have treated bordermaking and enforcement technologies. Consequently, I argue that the machines, data networks, and human agents that constitute the modern border apparatus function as a sociotechnical articulation of the settler-colonial state.

Notes on Contributors

Other| July 01 2022 Notes on Contributors Journal of American Ethnic History (2022) 41 (4): 127–128. https://doi.org/10.5406/19364695.41.4.15 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Notes on Contributors. Journal of American Ethnic History 1 January 2022; 41 (4): 127–128. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/19364695.41.4.15 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressJournal of American Ethnic History Search Advanced Search Kenneth S. Alyass is a PhD candidate at Harvard University in the Department of History. He is a social and political historian of the United States in the twentieth century, focusing on race, cities, social movements, and the carceral state in the post–Civil Rights Era.Liza Black is a citizen of Cherokee Nation and a visiting scholar at UCLA. She is currently at work on her second book, How to Get Away with Murder: A Transnational History of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women. Her first book is Picturing Indians: Native Americans in Film, 1941–1960.Hardeep Dhillon is a socio-legal historian of immigration and border enforcement. She is currently the ABF/NSF Postdoctoral Fellow in Law and Inequality at the American Bar Foundation, which occupies the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary lands of the Kiikaapoi, Peoria, Potawatomi, and Myaamia nations.Steven T. Green is a PhD candidate in the History Department... You do not currently have access to this content.

‘There is no race here’: on blackness, slavery, and disavowal in North Africa and North African studies

ABSTRACT This article brings comparative race and ethnic studies, migration studies, and North/African studies together to investigate how local-historical conceptions of blackness intersect with contemporary border policing of ‘sub-Saharan’ migrants. Defining race as a historically-contingent formation, I argue that blackness emerged at various periods in North African history (from the Islamic expansion to the present-day) to signify inferior social status and non-belonging, meanings that are shaped by the practices, discourses, and memories of slavery. This intervention connects critical studies on racialized border enforcement to other processes of social exclusions already at work within North African social space. It fills a critical gap in North African studies by providing a theoretically- and historically-grounded analysis of racial formation (and especially blackness) in the region that will have broad utility to scholars studying marginalisation and marginalised people’s political mobilisation at various historical moments. Finally, it challenges contemporary scholarship on race as (only) a modern category forged through European colonialism and trans-Atlantic slavery.

The More Things Change, The More they Stay the Same: Border Governance and Resistance along Mexico’s Southern Border with Guatemala

With the politics of borders, the socio-economic divide between the United States and Mexico is evident. The geographic proximity to the U.S. makes the Mexico–Guatemala border an extension of the U.S. border enforcement regime. This article argues that the politics surrounding the U.S.–Guatemala border have not necessarily changed, because, at the core, the main objective of these border governance practices is to stop the movement of undesirable bodies (Khosravi 2011). Further, the article argues that the practices of containment force migrants to resist through their movement and seek strategies of survival. By comparing the administrations of Peña Nieto and López Obrador (AMLO) and analyzing the survival strategy of migrant “caravans” through border policy analysis and fieldwork conducted in 2014, I show that this border is a site of struggle between the state’s power and migrants’ forms of resistance. I find that border tactics are influenced by U.S. border enforcement requirements of increased militarization and policing, but also aim to restrict and control certain populations. The result is the perpetual securitization of people and the militarization of pathways. Migrants, however, also employ forms of organizing such as travelling in mass groups to achieve safe passage, thus exercising their agency through movement. The bordering practices and the forms of resistance indicate that this border is a constant site of struggle that requires further examination.

Viral Borders: Migration, Deceleration, and the Re-Bordering of Mobility during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract States’ efforts to govern the COVID-19 public health emergency have been entangled with the ongoing work of producing and enforcing borders. Thus, on a global scale, the public health crisis has been converted into various spectacles of ostensible border “crisis.” Rather than seeing borders as purely a matter of control, however, it is instructive to situate the tactics of border enforcement in relation to the primacy, autonomy, and subjectivity of human mobility. If we start from the human freedom of movement and recognize border enforcement as a reaction formation, various tactics of border policing can be seen to introduce interruptions that temporarily decelerate cross-border mobilities. Compelled to revert to a kind of “standby” mode, migrants are temporarily immobilized and must find ways to convert their waiting from “dead time” into more or less productive time. Waiting to be re-activated, their mobilities remain an intractable and always potentially disruptive constitutive power.

“You can make it here!”: Producing Europe’s mobile borders in the New Gambia

European border externalization to “sending states” throughout Africa is a well-documented phenomenon. Less clear, however, is the role that African governments and implementing organizations play in border externalization, nor the precise mechanisms by which European borders are “mobilized” (Szary & Giraut, 2015) and projected into everyday spaces in “sending states”. Drawing on a case study of three different European border enforcement projects in The Gambia, I argue that a collaboration between the International Organization for Migration, the EU Emergency Trust Fund for Africa, and the Gambian government makes Gambians themselves agents of the European border. Drawing upon Szary and Giraut's notion of “borderities” (2015), I illustrate how the border is projected into The Gambia through an articulation of humanitarian borderwork with developmental approaches intended to solve the “root causes of migration” (Zaun & Nantermoz, 2021). Furthermore, I argue that the Gambian government is not passive in the process of border externalization, but actively involved in interpreting and rearticulating European policies and narratives about migration. Following Adamson and Tsourapas' (2020) reworking of the “migration state” concept, I demonstrate the Gambian government's active interests in bordering its own citizens: simultaneously encouraging emigration for the sake of national “development” while immobilizing young Gambians as part of a broader strategy to cooperate with European states. This research illustrates both the immense value of a “borderities” approach to studying contemporary migration management, and the close association between borderwork and nationhood in African post-colonial states.

The Racialized Dimensions of Contemporary Immigration and Border Enforcement Policies and Practices

AbstractImmigration policies in the United States have not been explicitly race‐based since the mid‐20th Century. Nevertheless, the effects of contemporary US immigration enforcement practices are highly racialized. The further development of a “race conscious” approach in public policy and administration will help expand our understanding of the racialized dimensions of these policies and practices. Specifically, I call attention to how current approaches to immigration control disproportionately negatively affect non‐White immigrants from the so‐called “Global South,” contribute to racialization processes, and perpetuate racial inequality in the United States. Examples include the ways that undocumented immigration status is leading to the emergence of a new “underclass” in the United States, the separation and dissolution of Latino families through mass deportation, and the systematic criminalization of non‐White undocumented immigrants from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador.