More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Started reading
April 14, 2018
the
People whose loved ones have disappeared in this desert will tell you that it’s the not knowing what happened to them coupled with the flashes of grotesque possibility that drive you insane.
the “noble” European immigrants of the past and Latino border crossers of today.
putting nationality before humanity.
sovereignty, law, and individual rights to understand the role that the physical space between adjoining nations plays in the construction of citizens, noncitizens, and state power.6
Agamben’s characterization of the concentration camp, the spatial arrangement of borders often allows a space to exist outside the bounds of normal state or moral law.
Border zones become spaces of exception —physical and political locations where an individual’s rights and protections under law can be stripped away upon entrance. Having
by border policies that do not recognize the rights of unauthorized migrants.
The perception that the lives of border crossers are insignificant is reflected in both their treatment by federal immigration enforcement agencies and in the pervasive anti-immigrant discourse,
This space can be policed in ways that would be deemed violent, cruel, or irrational in most other contexts. Just imagine how people would react if the corpses of undocumented Latinos were left to rot on the ninth hole of the local golf course or if their sun-bleached skulls were piled up in the parking lot of the neighborhood McDonald’s.
“uncivilized” noncitizens.
suspended—the zone where the violence of the state of exception is deemed to operate in the service of ‘civilization.’”
violently while simultaneously neutralizing their ability to resist or protest.
that “the raw physicality” of the desert “can be exploited and can function to mask the workings of social and political power.”
Between October 2000 and September 2014, the bodies of 2,721 border crossers were recovered in southern Arizona alone.14 Approximately 800
of these individuals are still unidentified.15 Second, this particular moment
produced by the US Department of Homeland Security. In Spanish the flier warned, “The next time you try to cross the border without documents you could end up a victim of the desert.”
Prevention Through Deterrence (PTD) strategy that since the 1990s has deliberately funneled people into the desert.
The operation’s effects were felt along much of the US-Mexico border during the 1990s when it was adopted in Southern California (“Operation Gatekeeper” in 1994), Arizona (“Operation Safeguard” in 1994 and 1999), and South Texas (“Operation Rio Grande” in 1997).
Chinese Exclusion Acts [enacted in 1882], immigration authorities had discovered that the desert and mountain wilderness could be made effective allies in the fight against undocumented entry.
Illegal entrants crossing through remote, uninhabited expanses of land and sea along the border can find themselves in mortal danger”
more aggressive and violent (and thus more effective) than previous programs.
of the migrants whose movement these defense experts were working to stop were fleeing violence in Central America that US interventionist policies had sanctioned and supported.
“hostile” to “harsh,” “inhospitable,” and the like.
correlation between the strategy and migrant fatalities.
‘The overarching goal of the strategy is to make it so difficult and so costly to enter this country illegally that fewer individuals even try.’”
has pushed unauthorized migration away from population centers and funneled it into more remote and hazardous border regions. This policy has had the unintended consequence of increasing the number of fatalities along the border, as unauthorized migrants attempt to cross over the inhospitable Arizona desert without adequate supplies of water” (emphasis added).41 This
policy makers were well aware of the role that death would play in this enforcement strategy.
43 The sector of the American public that attributes a low value to the lives of migrants seems to mirror the federal government’s perspective.
Prevention Through Deterrence set the stage for the desert to become the new “victimizer” of border transgressors.
In 1993 this sector accounted for 8 percent of total southern border apprehensions. By 2000, 37 percent of all immigration arrests happened in
not significantly dissuaded would-be crossers,
Many have died since the implementation of this policy, and the correlation between the funneling of people toward desolate regions of the border and an upsurge in fatalities is strong.
Known migrant deaths fell from a high of 344 in 1988 to a low of 171 in 1994 before climbing back to 286 in 1998. According to DHS data, known migrant deaths climbed from 250 in 1999 to 492 in 2005, and averaged 431 deaths per year in 2005–2009 before falling to an average of 360 per year in 2010–2011. . . . The apparent increase in migrant deaths is particularly noteworthy in light of the declining number of alien apprehensions (i.e., estimated unauthorized entries) during the same period. . . . Overall, these data offer evidence that border crossings have become more hazardous since the
...more
Department of Homeland Security routinely publishes the lowest number of recorded migrant deaths.50
These grim figures represent only known migrant fatalities.
focuses on blaming the smugglers who “endanger migrants in the desert.” This shift in federal tone that now deflects culpability away from policy and toward the environment and coyotes is summed up well in an article in the Arizona Daily Star in which a Border Patrol agent reflects on the discovery of several migrant bodies: “The Sonoran Desert is extremely vast and remote with very few water sources. . . . [I]t is important to realize illegal immigrants are being victimized and lied to by smugglers who lead them through treacherous terrain and expose them to extreme conditions.”53 Joseph
...more
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
wants to convince you that it’s a humane policy designed simply to prevent crime, to discourage it before it happens.
It’s a semantic cloak
Rather than being viewed as a key partner in the border enforcement strategy, the desert is framed as a ruthless beast that law enforcement cannot be responsible for.
Deterrence strategy has created a setting in which the Border Patrol can draw on the agency of animals and other nonhumans to do its dirty work while simultaneously absolving itself of any blame connected to migrant injuries or loss of life.
Doty calls the federal government’s “moral alibi.”
Humphreys and Watson call this type of account semifictionalized ethnography, or a “restructuring of events occurring within one or more ethnographic investigations into a single narrative.”
light winter rains. This lunar landscape is a place where you can die of thirst in June, drown in a flash flood in August, or freeze to death in January.
recent years numerous border crossers have reported being fired at in the Sonoran Desert by white men decked out in camouflage. The murders of several people remain unsolved.36
There is also strong evidence that Border Patrol agents remotely monitor migrants and let them continue walking in the desert for prolonged periods before attempting to apprehend them.
Prevention Through Deterrence is designed to hurt people.
Demystification
people whose lives have no political or social value. The
(“this policy has had the unintended consequence of increasing the number of fatalities along the border”17),
