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This epilogue discusses the death of civil defense proclaimed by President George H. W. Bush and then by President Bill Clinton, followed by its resurrection in 2001. The current Homeland Security provisions are compared to previous civil defense measures. The emergence of a large grassroots resistance movement against the Patriot Act is described.

What cultural products make it back to the US from the Middle East and North Africa in the present? This epilogue discusses the peristence of Orientalism in the contemporary US--focusing on the TV serials Homeland, Tyrant, the graphic novel Habibi by Craig Thompson, and the novels of Dave Eggers.

This chapter discusses how governments and agencies communicate terrorism threat to the general public and the potential negative consequences such threat dissemination may have on individuals and societies. Special focus is given to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Advisory System, the terrorism alert system that was implemented in the United States in the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, although other international alert systems are also discussed (e.g., United Kingdom and France). Drawing on scientific research, this chapter also discusses how the Homeland Security Advisory System (as well as other similar terrorism alert systems) may actually exacerbate fears, stress, and anxiety in the general public. Further, using research as a frame, this chapter provides suggestions for how to disseminate threat information to different strata of the population, including how much information to disseminate, how specific it should be, and how to deliver it in the most effective way—to avoid frustration and fear, and promote preparedness and understanding.

This introduction lies out the central dilemma at the heart of the book: migrant death and suffering at the U.S.–Mexico border. It presents an overview of the causes behind these deaths, including how U.S. border security measures have created a deadly funnel effect for migrants, and how a confluence of illegal smuggling operations, combined with the U.S. demand for cheap labor, have led to increased danger for migrants. The core ethical questions of the book are presented: Is it a human right to migrate according to need? Or is it a human right for citizens of a sovereign nation to be able to monitor and control their borders? How might a reasonable balance be struck between true compassion and suitable law that guarantees the safety and dignity of all people?

This chapter looks at the fears that many Arizonans feel concerning illegal immigration, as well as the logic behind current anti-illegal immigration sentiment. It discusses the rise of Civil Patrol groups in southern Arizona and addresses the rationale of Border Patrol strategies to gain and maintain control of the border. It discusses the ways in which illegal immigration is having a detrimental effect on local ranchers, and addresses the criminal threats, domestic threats, and cultural threats that many anti-illegal immigration activists fear, not just in Arizona but across the nation. This chapter serves as a juxtaposition to the first half of the book, providing a stage for the voices of people who stress the need for law, order, and security at the border.

The chapter considers the goals of the deportation system in light of U.S. immigration history, policies, and self-definition as a ‘nation of immigrants.’ It offers a functional definition of deportation and distinguishes extended border control (aimed at illegal immigration) from post-entry social control. It also notes the ethnic and racial aspects of the system and how it relates to crime and national security goals. It examines the culture of ICE and the Department of Homeland Security and examines such programs as the Secure Borders Initiative and Secure Communities.

Before the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the United States's homeland defence policy focused on threats from state, rather than from non-state, actors. In December 2000, the Gilmore Commission reported that ‘the organisation of the Federal Government's programs for combating terrorism is fragmented, uncoordinated, and politically unaccountable’. Despite that warning, the administration of George W. Bush paid little attention to the terrorist threat before September 11. Since that date, in contrast, the Bush administration engaged in the biggest governmental reorganisation in half a century in an effort better to protect the United States from terrorist attack. According to one official involved in homeland security, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the centrepiece of Bush's organisational reforms, is ‘so dysfunctional, and so destructive to agency functions, that it should be dismantled’. This chapter assesses the Bush administration's efforts to improve homeland security by transforming the homeland security bureaucracy. It also discusses the politics of homeland security and the organisational challenges faced by the Bush administration in trying to reform homeland security.

This chapter examines the state of affairs in Haiti a year after the earthquake. It begins by discussing the return of Jean-Claude Duvalier, who was charged with corruption and embezzlement but defied house arrest, touring around town in a luxury automobile. It then considers what Haitians and grassroots and nonprofit organizations felt regarding Duvalier's return. It also describes the cholera epidemic that struck Haiti as well as the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's decision to resume deportations of people with “serious criminal convictions.” Given health and sanitation conditions in Haiti, especially in its deportee holding cells, the chapter shows that the move was opposed by human rights and refugee organizations.

Everyday, women flee their countries of origin to come to the United States for asylum. Many of the 135,000 to 150,000 refugees in removal proceedings at any given time in the United States are women who are forced to flee their countries of origin as a result of war, political instability, and other societal conflicts related to their gender, including state repression, politically unstable in-country conditions, female genital mutilation, political rapes, sexual slavery, prostitution, and planned and forced marriages. Instead of receiving the protection for which they travel many miles, sometimes in the most horrible conditions, women detainees frequently report physical and sexual abuse, overcrowded facilities, inadequate or nonexistent medical care, and illegal, arbitrary, insensitive discipline and solitary confinement. This chapter highlights the experiences of women detainees across Florida and the conditions in the detention centers in the Miami Department of Homeland Security District.

This chapter discusses the alternatives offered by Zionism in order to attract the numbers that could transform Palestine into the Jewish National Homeland. However romantic, life on the land generally entailed considerable privation and demanded dedication and personal sacrifice, forcing most Jews to go to cities. For those headed to Palestine's cities there were alternatives, as there were for those who preferred the countryside. They could choose established centers such as the traditional “holy” cities of Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed, and Tiberias or they could settle in ancient Jaffa on the Mediterranean coast. They could become pioneers in the establishment of the new totally Jewish centers of Tel Aviv or Afula, or the moshavoth that were being transformed from farming villages to towns, suburbs, and cities, or they could settle in Haifa, a dynamic city on the country's northern coast.

Jeff Wall and Ian Wallace’s rejection of ‘home’ and ‘homeland,’ and the primacy of the manifesto as an important polemical tool in framing one’s work, are explored in Chapter 3 in relation to Wall’s art history master’s thesis on the Berlin Dada group, which established “myth” as an anti-critical cultural practice that was broadly applied to much of the cultural activity then active in Vancouver. Vancouver’s seeming “lack of history,” the existence of back-to-the-land intentional communities living outside of the urban centre, the proliferation of other performance and media based art groups, and the influence of visiting American artist Robert Smithson’s earthworks are all examined as cultural expressions deemed a-historical or romantic by photo-conceptualists.

Chapter 5 moves away from an analysis of so-called elite discourse and instead analyses discourses and understandings of Russian speakers at the ground level. This chapter is based on focus group interviews with groups of Russian speakers in Riga. As part of this analysis, focus group participants were asked to respond to various quotations that were picked out from the previously-conducted media analysis (Chapter 4). This data was used to assess media effects in the Latvian context. Their responses are analysed and comparisons are made between elite production of discourse and its ground-level consumption.The influence of discourses which emanate from Russia and from Latvia is also analysed as part of an attempt to understand how Russian speakers are negotiating their sense of identity and homeland in Latvia. The analysis distinguishes between cultural and political identities which result in varying forms of attraction for the respective Russian and Latvian spaces.

For many, the punitive turn in immigration stems from the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Although 9/11 linked immigration and national security, this link occurred more in the national imagination than in practice. The day-to-day operations of Border Patrol agents do not involve intercepting terrorists or chemical weapons, nor are border agents apprehending migrants from countries on the “state sponsors of terrorism” or “terrorist safe haven” lists. Despite the rhetorical conflation of immigration with terrorism and national security, what border enforcement looks like in practice is little more than domestic crime control extended to an immigration context. The introductory chapter recounts over a decade of historical and ethnographic research on this new blend of immigration and crime control that began well before the events of September 11.

Prominent Arizona conservatives and, some would argue, liberal reformers helped spearhead law and order policies that exploded the U.S. prison population and created a crisis of prison overcrowding. This chapter argues that the scramble for prison beds was a major force behind the Criminal Alien Program (CAP), which Congress pushed as a way to purge noncitizens from jails and prisons in order to free up prison beds. CAP gave primacy to criminal enforcement targets and unleashed an onslaught of measures that restructured immigrant detention and deportation, spawned similar programs like “absconder” initiatives, “fugitive” operations, Security Communities, and immigrant prosecution programs like Operation Streamline—in other words, many of the punitive policies we associate with the criminalization of migration in the United States today. However, punitive policies are not necessarily a “backlash” against rights and protections that reformers fought for for over a century. Rather, they operate within post–civil rights “antidiscrimination” constitutional frameworks in ways that recognize rights for certain “victims,” while aggressively punishing and banishing those branded as criminal.

The concluding chapter reflects on the Department of Justice’s recent criminal justice reforms, and the Department of Homeland Security’s new Priority Enforcement Program, designed to target “felons, not families.” Evaluating border crossers and borderlanders on the basis of criminal history has created a new enforcement terrain and new forms of criminalization that differ from historic practices of illegalization. The concluding chapter reflects on this shifting enforcement arena and the global diffusion of criminal enforcement priorities under the so-called war on terror and considers the implications for migrant advocates and academics concerned with race and democracy.

This chapter explores the errata exhibition, a show that counters a mainstream presentation of art. With the appearance of the errata exhibition in 1975, Chicana feminist artists leveraged institutional critique against both mainstream arts institutions and community-based practices that ignored or narrowly interpreted their work. These artists, including Judy Baca, Barbara Carrasco, and Judithe Hernández, introduced an alternative analysis of Chicana/o art, illuminating the complexity, multiplicity, and generative qualities of their cultural production. The chapter argues that errata exhibitions are undocumented sites of critical borderlands discourse with which art historians, curators, and critics must engage to remain relevant.

This chapter describes the contradictory information the legal team receives from the Department of Homeland Security and other sources concerning the whereabouts of the defendant, Alvaro Saravia, including information that he could be in Central America or in the United States. As team speculates that they could be receiving misleading data, the chapter describes an episode in the 1980s when Roberto D’Aubuisson and others fabricated a witness statement by someone nicknamed Pedro Lobo that the leftist guerrillas killed Archbishop Romero. The team meets in Miami with a key investigator who tries to develop leads not only on the financiers but also a Nicaraguan man, Ricardo Lao, who allegedly received money from Roberto D’Aubuisson to arrange Romero’s murder.