Contested Places: Borders, Bordering, and Immigration Policies Flashcards
Why are borders created? Why are borders enforced through large walls?
Borders being created:
- Borders allow for the monitoring of people across boundaries.
- Borders for countries not at war = undocumented people crossing borders.
Reasons for Borders as Walls:
- INC Pop.
- Growing level of inequality (places with low economies are encouraged to move across lines where economy is stronger).
- Recently, more people are forcibly displaced and seek asylum as refugees.
- Walls as a result of fearing terrorism.
What are the consequences of border walls? Why are they Ineffective?
Consequences:
- Migrants have to choose dangerous ways to cross borders. Results in less people successfully getting across.
- Ex. INC deaths in Arizona, and through the Balkans, Darien Gap is most dangerous jungle in the world.
Ineffectiveness:
- Very expensive to build, maintain, and guard the entire length of the wall.
- Walls not effective in stopping terrorists and smugglers. They often enter legally or use tunnels.
- Most “unauthorized” immigrants enter with a valid visa and overstay.
What is the issue with the word “illegal” immigrant? What are other problematic terms?
Illegal:
- People themselves can not be illegal, the things you do and acts you can commit are illegal.
- Many immigration offenses are violations of civil law, not criminal law.
Undocumented:
- means someone lacks a document, but can fall out of being documented and undocumented easily.
- US law can forbid someone from staying in a state (more than a problem of documents).
Unauthorized:
- More technically correct, however someone can enter with authorization and the overstay the Visa limit.
How does one estimate the amount of unauthorized immigrants in a country?
- First, use immigration records to determine the number of immigrants LEGALLY in the country.
- Then, look at a census to get an estimate of the number of authorized and unauthorized immigrants in the country.
- Finally, subtract the lawful immigrants from the total.
- lawful immigrants = permanent residents OR refugees.
What is Title 42 and what were its impacts during COVID?
Title 42 = overrides immigration law by refusing to admit people seeking asylum after entering the US illegally due to public health concerns during COVID.
- Encounters = apprehensions at the border and expulsions.
- Lots of encounters during COVID into the US from Mexico.
- Created asylum seeker camps in Mexico. To evaluate asylum claims, had to wait 6-8 weeks for a customs and border protection appointment (CBP One).
Should there still be a massive concern about the border? If not, then why is it still a massive topic?
- NO!!!! The places that are most affected by unauthorized immigrants are on the outskirts of the US, small part of the labor force.
- Still a hysteria about immigrants and the “need” to build a wall.
Why the Concern?
- Borders woven into social control –> borders teach us who we are and what makes us “us”.
- AKA who belongs and who does not.
- Borders as a narrative, making it and giving it meaning is a PROCESS.
Discuss the 3 ways in which borders are everywhere:
- Borders are part of a societal discourse.
- Borders have stretched into airports, mobile border checkpoints, etc.
- Ex. as soon as you clear immigration customs in Ottawa, you are technically in the US. Border can now exist outside the country. - Borders are a discursive device for social control. Can define who you are as a citizen and a person. Separates people.
What are the different definitions of Territory?
- A spatial expression of the modern nation-state.
- Organizing the world into territorial states.
- Territorial integrity is exercised, aspect of international law. - Space/Place that shape human life and allow for interactions. (e.g. provinces, countries, states, apartments, public and private space, etc.)
- Supra-national organization of space (e.g. EU).
- Informs key aspects of individual and collective identity.
- Can implicate issues of race, gender, age, sexuality.
- Territory informed by beliefs, desires, ways of knowing.
What is territoriality and how does it differ from territory? What are it’s 3 qualities/characteristics?
Territoriality = Geographic strategy to control people and things by controlling land/area.
- It is always socially or humanly constructed, only exists if individuals or groups wish to affect the behavior’s of others.
- Primary geographic expression of social power.
Qualities/Characteristics:
1. Must involve a form of classification by area.
- Just have to say all these things in my territory belong to me.
- Communicating the boundary through things like markers, signs, physical force.
- Each instance of territoriality must involve an attempt at enforcing control over access.
- Limit access in the territory or the ability for people to leave the territory.
How is Territory related to place?
- When you create territory, you create a kind of place. Needs constant effort to establish AND maintain.
- Territories are results of strategies to affect and control people.
- The boundaries of a territory and ways they are communicated can be changeable.
How is Territoriality linked to everyday life?
Doxa or ideology that comes with it:
- Territoriality most effective when regarded in an “everyday manner”.
- Territory must be tied to beliefs, desires, and cultural ways of knowing.
- Ex. Private property is a territory, someone has territoriality over that property, gives an idea of the rights of the property. There’s power to control what happens in that property.
What is the issue with the term Security?
- Security is meaningless without the definition of the “other”.
- Other is constructed through discourse from elites, they declare what is a “security problem”.
- Security problems ONLY EXIST when ELITES say they do. - Security is a contested term because it does not rely on empirical measurement or magnitude. Instead relies or MORAL and IDEOLOGICAL judgement.
- Discourse of elites can help define the problem or threat, and from there determine a solution.
Describe the 2 phases to construct security:
Phase 1:
- Original discourse on borders = migration and narcotics. Wanted to seal the border between USA and Mexico. Original context around the border pre 1990s was not a focal point.
- War on Drugs = drugs being moved across the border and infecting American population. Government officials got super scared and thought drugs were being handed out like candy. Created operation Hold the Line to combat this.
- Immigrants in Nashville could not get bank accounts so they were paid in cash. Gangs would target these people because they were walking ATM’s
Phase 2:
- Border becomes a position for terrorism and weapons of destruction. Threats against Americans will be protected by building a border.
- HOWEVER, people that attacked US trade system entered LEGALLY!! Did not sneak pass the border. Yet we put the blame on US-Mexico border.
- Stronger link between migration as a reason for terrorism. Yet there’s no fact that these weapons of mass destruction cross the border… Number of people that cross the border illegally is small, yet large emphasis is still placed on this.
- No effective policy in place to deal with forced migrants or terrorism (last immigration policy from 1965).
What are the Borderlands? What are the effects of building a wall on borderlands?
Borderlands = Space of movement between US and Mexico, usually communities just along the border.
- Communities on the line are distant from centers of political power, and composed of many cultures.
- Considered a Third Nation = community carved out of territories between 2 existing nations.
Effects of the wall:
- Land ownership issues.
- Humanitarian issues.
- Economy and crossing issues.
- Initiates local law enforcement of immigration law.
What are 4 options to deal with border problems/issues?
- Law-and-order measures
- Recognize immigration systems bind sending, receiving, and transit countries together (self-feeding dynamic).
- All transactional contacts have some migration consequences.
- Find ways to decrease suffering and poverty to DEC illegal immigration.
What are the 4 main issues of the border wall?
- Hasn’t solved anything since 1970.
- Creates a self-feeding dynamic. Violence poverty and insecurity are part of everyday life, while receiving countries benefit from the resources and people of those regions.
- Contact with countries will encourage migration, so building a fence wont solve the problem. There exists pressure to have migration because of contact between Canada, USA, and Mexico.
- Suffering and poverty will always encourage illegal immigration. People will risk there lives to get across the border because of desperate conditions. Will always make border contested.
