Abstract
Some people want to migrate for safety, work, or to reunite with family members but have to hide from immigration authorities and, in the process, have to go through risky situations. The results for some are terrible. On 27 March 2023, 39 migrants died, and 29 were injured in a fire at an immigration facility in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico (Olson et al., 2023). On 27 June 2022, 53 people died inside a semi-truck close to San Antonio, Texas, after asphyxiating due to the hot weather (Sanchez et al., 2022). These tragedies were predictable and expected because they had happened in the past due to restrictionist policies implemented. In the first 3 months of 2023, over 400 immigrants died in the Mediterranean (Reuters, 2023). In 2022, over 853 migrants died crossing the US-Mexico border (Montoya-Galvez, 2023). In 2022, more than 250,000 people crossed the dangerous Darien Gap jungle in Panama, resulting in countless deaths due to the area’s harsh conditions (Schmidt, 2023). In 2020, 19 people died in border patrol custody (American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA), 2023). These numbers represent tragedies and terrible situations that impact families and their social environments. These deaths are tragic (tragic in the original Greek dramaturgic meaning of the word) because they happen by design and are foreseeable. Yet nothing is done to prevent them.
Migration and Mortality: Social Death, Dispossession, and Survival in the Americas highlights how international migrants are disproportionately exposed to and experience death and how the world perceives this as normal. The book aims to unpack the policies and practices that contribute to the widespread acceptance of migrant death. The authors discuss the link between migration policies and systemic oppression and inequality. Hallett and Longazel argue that much of contemporary migration policy can be understood as governments doing “just enough” to escape fault for human rights abuses but not enough to end them.
This volume questions how much work around the violence immigrants face is highly detailed but does not always points to ways to end it. For the editors, an ethical and political commitment to abolishing institutions and policies that reproduce oppression is essential to stopping immigrant dispossession and death. This edited volume also explores how death could be productive in creating community, kin, and social obligations from tragedies caused by state violence toward immigrants. Presenting an alternative view of what death could mean recognizes how the law has material consequences beyond borders detention and deportation and how laws could be changed to prevent these premature deaths. Unfortunately, anti-immigrant laws are deeply intertwined with capitalism, imperialism, White supremacy, labor exploitation, and a lack of affordable health care. National and international state structures and policies dispossess immigrants of their safety, body autonomy, agency, and, sometimes, life itself. Public discourse on migration often dehumanizes migrants. Nevertheless, the chapters of this book also include examples of immigrants’ agency and resistance, highlighting the importance of remembering as a memory building and also as the act of (re)membering something that has been dismembered (p. 12), as Susan Coutin (2016) puts it.
Chapters range from ethnographic studies to quantitative data recollection and analysis that offer empirical evidence about migration struggles to help to denaturalize suffering and death as the consequences of it. Discussions on necropolitics and necrocapitalism focus on how antimigration policies related to militarism, dispossession, and law enforcement sometimes have deadly consequences and other times make immigrants live with death as a recurrent presence that does not let them be fully alive. The threat of death along the journey, in detention, and after deportation to situations that may lead to their death, all mean that death haunts immigrants and their families and communities.
The book is divided into four parts: Haunted Humanitarianism, the first part, dives into humanitarianism’s relationship to violence and how even the most well-intentioned humanitarian acts can result in negative impacts. This section includes three chapters on migrant facilities and death, the Maya Migration, and an ethnographic study of the San Antonio Border Security Expo.
The second part, Death and Dispossession, focuses on how the threat of death takes resources away from migrants, through chapters on the productive power of the US-Mexico border, the commodification of immigrants, and healthcare and illnesses among migrant farmworkers. Part 3 is titled Epidemiologies of Living with Death and is centered around public health and how migrants in the United States live with the constant threat of death and, therefore, cannot live whole and healthy lives. These chapters include discussions about morbidity and mortality among immigrants, deportation and disabilities, and the relationship between healthcare and legal violence through the case of immigrant kidney failure patients. The fourth and final part looks at the role of the US government in migrant policies as well as topics like social death, physical mortality, and survival, with chapters on asylum and transnational death between Mexico and the United States, jail, and death, migrant labor and its challenges, and the politics of survival.
As the editors explain, this book seeks to illuminate violence that reproduces systems of exclusion, deconstruct and denounce mechanisms that normalize that violence, and call for solidarity with immigrants. This volume provides various lenses to understand that policies in the name of national security are causing insecurity for dispossessed bodies, that the responsibilities must be shared between states, and that scholars have potent tools to create new and supportive policies and narratives on migration.