US Immigration Enforcement Research Articles

Lines in the Sand? Towards an Agenda for Critical Border Studies

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. E. Balibar, ‘The Borders of Europe’, in P. Cheah and B. Robbins (eds.), Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, trans. by J. Swenson (London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1998) pp. 216–233. 2. Y. Lapid, ‘Introduction: Identities, Borders, Orders: Nudging International Relations Theory in a New Direction’, in M. Albert, D. Jacobson, and Y. Lapid (eds.), Identities, Borders, Orders: Re-Thinking International Relations Theory (London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2001) p. 8. 3. A comprehensive survey of this literature is beyond the scope of this deliberately short position piece. However, some examples symptomatic of the critical shift to which we refer include: L. Amoore, ‘Biometric Borders: Governing Mobilities in the War on Terror’, Political Geography 25 (2006) pp. 336–351; M. Coleman, ‘A Geopolitics of Engagement: Neoliberalism, the War on Terrorism, and the Reconfiguration of US Immigration Enforcement’, Geopolitics 12/4 (Oct. 2007) pp. 607–634; S. Elden, ‘Contingent Sovereignty, Territorial Integrity, and the Sanctity of Borders’, SAIS Review of International Affairs 26/1 (2006) pp. 11–24; H. Van Houtum, O. Kramsch, and W. Zierhofer (eds.), B/ordering Space (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate 2005); D. Johnson and S. Michaelson (eds.), Border Theory: The Limits of Cultural Politics (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press 1997); P. Kumar Rajaram and C. Grundy-Warr (eds.), Borderscapes: Hidden Geographies and Politics at Territory's Edge (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press 2007); W. Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2000); D. Newman, ‘Borders and Bordering: Towards an Interdisciplinary Dialogue’, European Journal of Social Theory 9 (2006); N. Parker, ‘From Borders to Margins: A Deleuzian Ontology for Identities in the Postinternational Environment’, Alternatives 34/1 (2009) 17–39; C. Minca, ‘Giorgio Agamben and the New Biopolitical Nomos’, Geografiska Annaler 88B/4 (2006) pp. 387–403; C. Rumford (ed.), ‘Global Borders’, of Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Special Issue (forthcoming); M. Salter, ‘The Global Visa Regime and the Political Technologies of the International Self: Borders, Bodies, Biopolitics’, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 31/2 (2006) pp. 167–189; R. B. J. Walker, Before the Globe/After the World (London and New York: Routledge, forthcoming); N. Vaughan-Williams, Border Politics: The Limits of Sovereign Power (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 2009); W. Walters, ‘Border/Control’, European Journal of Social Theory, Special Issue (ed. by C. Rumford) 9/2 (2006) pp. 187–193; J. Williams, The Ethics of Territorial Borders: Drawing Lines in the Shifting Sand (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2006). 4. J. Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins Press 1976); J. Derrida, Margins of Philosophy (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press 1982); J. Derrida, Limited Inc. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press 1988). 5. R. B. J. Walker, Inside/outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1993). 6. G. Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press 1998). 7. C. Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum (New York: Telos Press 2001).

A Geopolitics of Engagement: Neoliberalism, the War on Terrorism, and the Reconfiguration of US Immigration Enforcement

In addition to a geopolitics of containment model of immigration policing at the Mexico-US border, US immigration-related statecraft has incorporated a geopolitics of engagement model in which spaces previously at arms reach from US immigration authorities and at some remove from the border have been aggressively brought into the purview of US immigration enforcement. These newly engaged spaces are at once local (i.e., US cities) and regional (i.e., Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean Basin). This shift has in large part been a response to the tension between trade and security at the border, and thus allows us to see differently how statecraft is being multiplied, reactivated and transformed at and away from the border in light of the war on terrorism and its complex relationship with economic globalisation and the neoliberalisation of the Mexico-US border region.