Search Results

This chapter explores the global surveillance optic that derives from docuseries that take place at airport borders in the “Five Eyes,” an intelligence and security alliance among the United States, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Canada, and Australia. The various docuseries from each member of the Five Eyes deliver the global procedures, operations, and plotlines of border security. This chapter explores how state and entertainment entities shape flows of soft power animating global border-security discourses and practices. With ambitions even greater than the surveillance initiatives at US borders, the mediated cultures of border security project and endeavor to enact a future of an integrated global surveillance imaginary. These shows establish the imperial norms of border security, enacted and dramatized by human agents through their affective guidance, tutelage, moral judgment, and willed determinations.

This chapter provides a discussion on the Chinese and Russian interests on the Korean Peninsula. It begins by presenting the notion of a strategic partnership. Beyond the Korean Peninsula, China revealed a marked disinterest in Russian regional concerns, and the strategic partnership was largely irrelevant. The chapter then deals with the rising China. A rising China presents new challenges for Russia and the strategic partnership they have formed. Not only has China overshadowed Russia on the Korean Peninsula but it has emerged as key player in regional bodies in the Asia-Pacific, where Russia has been struggling to make its voice heard. Despite the anticipated vicissitudes, the strategic partnership between Russia and China is likely to survive, for it is too important for both nations to cast aside. In sustaining this relationship both sides have been motivated by a concern for border security and the stability of outlying areas such as Central Asia. In addition, China's needs for Russian energy will increase and Russia's share of China's oil imports is expected to rise well beyond the current 10 percent.

This chapter is about the various projections of the future border based in the temporal and spatial collapse of the meaning of “frontiers” as sites beyond the horizon of the present. The US homeland-security imaginary in its strategic plan designates borders, including its iconic territorial US-Mexico border, as the final technological frontier for state power. This chapter explores possible border futures of and beyond the surveillant imaginary of the Global North through the various borderland future plans and designs created by architects, artists, and visionaries. It explores several versions of the border future, from the border-security futurism of Customs and Border Protection to the future imaginaries of speculative fictions, activist work, and design models and philosophies about the border future.

Chapter 3 explains how the gap between state-centric views on borderlines and transnational realities at the margins turn borderlands in vulnerable regions into extreme cases of complex security dynamics. First, it presents how state-centric views that stop at the borderline have historically shaped security policies toward the Colombia-Ecuador and Colombia-Venezuela borders. It then contrasts these with a transnational perspective that analyzes security dynamics from within the Colombian-Ecuadorian and Colombian-Venezuelan borderlands. Adopting such a transnational borderland lens, the chapter maps violent non-state group interactions in recent history across these borderlands and contextualizes them with the spatial distribution of the various cocaine supply chain stages and interconnected forms of transnational organized crime. Together with socioeconomic and cultural conditions that vary along and across the borders, the logic of these illicit cross-border flows informs the groups’ motives for cooperation, which in turn shape their interactions.

This chapter analyses the management and implementation of Algeria’s security policies at a time when the country’s security apparatus is adapting to the changing regional political landscape. The chapter demonstrates how the volatile security situations in neighbouring Mali and Libya highlight the need for parting ways with the conventional Algerian security policy of non-intervention. By mapping key actors and the political restructuring of certain executive organs in the upper echelons of state administration dealing with security, the chapter exposes the driving factors behind current Algerian security policies. Furthermore, this chapter sheds light on the incremental changes in Algeria’s regional alliance affinities, defense procurement choices and domestic military planning with regards to border security on the operational level. It argues that differences of opinion between the Sahelo-Maghrebian countries on the role of extra-regional actors will continue to hamper efforts to stabilise the region.

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.

Human migration has been a factor in environmental disruption along the United States–Mexico border both historically and in modern times. This chapter examines the impact of human migration as well as the impact of modern-day border security forces in Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge. The refuge is a federally protected wilderness area in southern Arizona on the U.S.-Mexico border. The root causes of environmental disruption in the region are often blamed on modern undocumented immigrants. However, U.S. border security forces also create significant environmental disruption and degradation. Through an examination of the environmental history of human migration in the region, we see that people have long used this region as a travel corridor. A longer-term historical analysis offers a more comprehensive understanding of human migration and environmental disruption along the U.S.-Mexico border.

This chapter begins with a discussion of border control and transversal borders. It then examines how Australian immigration authorities have become more police-like under pressure to secure borders. It argues that Australian police are increasingly occupied in migration policing roles and that other government and non-government agencies are being drawn into wider migration policing networks. In each context, border policing developments at both the external and internal borders are considered.

This chapter argues that a surprisingly large number of Armenian migrants returned to the Ottoman Empire between 1890 and 1908 in the face of many obstacles. It demonstrates how in this period, the Ottoman state increasingly viewed Armenian return migration as a major threat to the empire’s political stability. As a result, Armenians were forced to find creative ways to bypass Istanbul’s efforts to keep them out. By the first decade of the twentieth century, the Ottoman state was engaged in an ambitious effort to militarize points of entry, both on land and sea, in an effort to stop Armenian migrants from reentering the empire, employing a decidedly “modern” discourse of border security to justify these efforts.

The conclusion provides an overview of developments in contemporary American immigration policy from 1954 to the present. Faced with the same dilemmas—how to open the borders to the free flow of trade, travelers, and commerce while closing it to the entry of undocumented immigrants and security threats—immigration policymakers have relied on old solutions. Border Patrol raids, legalization programs, guest worker agreements, and border crossing cards have been and continue to be central features of American immigration policy today. Yet by adopting the once ad hoc practices created by local immigration inspectors and Border Patrol officers, national policymakers also inherited their costs and consequences, the most serious of which included the arbitrariness, corruption, and even violence surrounding Border Patrol operations.

This chapter focuses on the system of “passport control” which was implemented during World War I as part of the United States's approach to national security in general and to border security in particular. More specifically, it examines the passport as a requirement for all people who entered and left the United States, along with the introduction and enforcement of new application requirements. It explains how “passport control” made the document part of a new regime of international travel and bureaucracy and describes the tensions generated by the use of nationality as a requirement for identifying people who crossed the border. It also considers the government's adoption of new, more direct forms of border control which were combined with the passport to regulate thousands of “aliens” trying to enter the United States illegally. Finally, the chapter explains how the claimed success of the documentary surveillance of borders during the war gave identification documents legitimacy in the postwar administration of immigration.

This chapter highlights that the police work on the border consists of the detection of the “illegal infiltrator.” It illustrates how the migrant woman from the east is, on the one hand, the subject of policing by the state and border security forces for she indexes the fear of the “illegal Bangladeshi migrant”; on the other hand, the designation by ordinary people of a host of migrant women as “Bengali” points to the difficulty of asserting in any “accurate” way, who is the target of censure and by whom. The chapter then explains the work they have to do to “belong” locally but resists casting the family as a place of refuge from the heightened visibility of the state. It argues instead that the possibility of exposure runs through every interaction, inside or outside the family. The chapter emphasizes that the idea of the “safe” space is recalibrated throughout as “Bengali” women move in and out of focus through multiply-mediated interactions and encounters as sometimes competing demands for visibility (for the police and border patrol, for NGO-led development work, or for the anthropologist) are managed. The family–NGO–state–anthropologist network pushes people to dissimulate differently, even as they are required to make themselves transparent—albeit in different ways—to each of these institutions and people.

This chapter addresses the transformation of geopolitical lines and borders in a globalizing world. In the Middle East, this transformation has been accompanied by severe social inequalities that have been expressed in a number of different ways: increasing limitations placed on the mobility of refugees and migrants, yet decreasing limitations on the cross-border flow of goods; a proliferation of refugee encampments and settlements (formal and informal); human vulnerability and rights violations; and expanded border securitization. In the case of Lebanon, these processes play out in especially stark fashion in big cities and border sites. This chapter focuses on one such site in an area of Lebanon: the Central Bekaa. It is important to start by looking at the context of borders and mobility in the Middle East. This chapter is based on original research that aims to provide an examination of certain aspects of borders and mobility, including the transnational circulation of displaced communities, cross-border networks, and how Syrian refugees in the Middle East—especially in Lebanon—navigate borders and deploy their own social capital in the process.

This chapter examines why the passport was not considered necessary when border security was defined through a racialized understanding of what made the nation productive and healthy, and when the primary “border” was a seaport. Citing the inspection procedures at Ellis Island, it considers immigration officials' distrust in the usefulness of the passport to identify individuals on the grounds of its uncertain legal authority. It shows that entry was policed at the border through the reading of bodies and personal appearances, rather than the reading of documents. The chapter also discusses the first Chinese Exclusion Act, passed by Congress in 1882, to restrict the entry of Chinese immigrants into the United States.

This chapter looks at the social and cultural divide between migrants' children who were raised in the United States and those born in Mexico. The gradual erosion of ties between migrants from the Alto Balsas and most of those they left behind is a straightforward process. The small minority of older adults who are “legal” make regular trips back to Mexico, since they have no trouble going back and forth across the border. However, it is not likely that their older children, born and raised in Mexico but now living in the United States, will visit Mexico very often, given the difficulty of reentry with heightened border security. In contrast, the American-born children of undocumented workers, as U.S. citizens, can easily visit relatives, as long as they or their parents can afford it.

The chapter analyzes the reasons that Mexico migration to the United States has dropped so dramatically since 2007. The drop in outmigration from Mexico has three causes: increased border security, improved living standards in Mexico, and demographic shifts. Of these three, the improved fortunes of the Mexican economy appear to be the most important factor that has decreased pressures for outmigration. The chapter suggests that low migration between the two countries is likely to continue into the future and that the period of high migration flows from the 1970s through 2007 is likely to be seen in the future as an anomaly.