Border Enforcement at Family Sites

Abstract

Border securitization and escalating detentions and deportations in the United States fall almost entirely on immigrant manual laborers from Mexico and Central America. Deportees face the possible permanent termination of their parental rights as their children are placed by child welfare agencies in adoptive or foster homes in the United States. This practice is embedded in a political economic and institutional legal framework that promotes forced family separation and neoracism by categorizing people by race, nationality, immigration status, income, language, and disability. It is reminiscent of racist practices of the past such as residential boarding schools designed to separate children from their aboriginal parents and communities.

El control fronterizo y al auge de detenciones y deportaciones en los Estados Unidos afectan principalmente a la mano de obra inmigrante de México y Centroamérica. Los deportados enfrentan el cese definitivo del derecho a sus hijos, mientras éstos se asignan por el Estado a hogares adoptivos o de crianza en los Estados Unidos. Esta práctica se origina en las políticas económicas y un marco jurídico que promueve la separación familiar forzada y el neoracismo al categorizar a las personas según la raza, nacionalidad, estado migratorio, ingreso, idioma, y discapacidad. Estas prácticas racistas nos recuerdan aquellas del pasado como las escuelas residenciales de internados diseñadas a separar a los hijos de sus padres, madres y comunidades indígenas.

Keywords

Undocumented immigration Social reproduction Manual labor Neoracism Forced family separation

In 2010, undocumented Mexican immigrant Felipe Montes was arrested in North Carolina for traffic violations related to driving with an expired license and then deported to Mexico. He had been living and working in a small town in North Carolina since 2003. He lived in a modest mobile home with his American-born wife, who was eight months pregnant at the time of his deportation, and the couple’s two children, a two-year-old and a four-year-old.¹ He was the family’s primary breadwinner and caregiver of the household, driving their children to day care every day while working for a landscaping company. According to the local authorities, Felipe’s wife had a disability that made her unable to support the family by herself. As a result, after his deportation the child welfare agency placed the children in foster care and requested termination of Felipe’s parental rights, arguing that it would be in the best interest of the children to remain in the United States in the care of U.S. families. The foster parents expressed their willingness to adopt the children, who after two years of separation no longer spoke Spanish, while their biological father was fighting from abroad before U.S. courts for his parental rights with the help of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and the Mexican consulate (Wessler, 2012). According to Wozniacka and Biesecker (2012), Felipe and his wife hoped to be able to reunite in Mexico and raise their three children there, but this depended on a U.S. court’s decision based on what it deemed “the best interest of the children.” After more than two years of litigation and petitions signed by tens of thousands of people, in February 2013 a North Carolina court ordered the reunification of Felipe with his children, restoring his parental rights (Wessler, 2013).

In a parallel case in Mississippi, authorities took a newborn girl from her mother and placed her in foster care. The mother, Cirila Baltazar Cruz, was an indigenous single mother from Oaxaca who was fluent only in her indigenous language, Chatino, speaking little Spanish and no English. She had moved to the United States hoping to send back money back for the two children she had left in her mother’s care. She had found work in a Chinese restaurant on Mississippi’s Gulf Coast and was living in her own apartment. Cirila arrived at the hospital to give birth after flagging down a police car on the street. A Chatino-speaking relative later joined her at the hospital, but the hospital declined his translation services and instead used a translator from state social services, a U.S.-born citizen of Puerto Rican descent who spoke no Chatino (Padgett, 2009). When the translator erroneously informed the authorities that Cirila had no place to live and no job, Cirila was labeled an unfit mother and her two-day-old baby, Rubi, was taken into the custody of the state. The baby girl was placed in foster care with a white couple seeking to adopt a child, attorneys who regularly practiced before the county juvenile court that had approved the child’s removal (Southern Poverty Law Center, 2013). According to the Associated Press (2010), Cirila was later falsely accused of being a sex worker—a criminal charge that automatically placed her on a high-priority list for deportation. After the intervention of two NGOs and the Mexican government and more than a year of litigation, Cirila was finally reunited with Rubi, and they are living in Oaxaca today.

In both cases, parents were separated from their children for long periods and at risk of losing them not because they were unfit, abusive, or neglectful but because of their immigration status in the United States and their nationality, ethnicity, language, and, in the case of Felipe’s wife, disability. The effects of border enforcement on deported individuals fall not only upon them but upon members of their families who rely on them, who may be U.S. citizens or documented immigrants and productive members of their communities, and on the businesses that rely on this immigrant population as a source of cheap labor or as customers for their products. After deportation, family members find themselves in disarray, with little hope of reunification. The exact number of infants and children who have suddenly found themselves without their biological parents after one or both have been arrested and deported is unknown, but it is estimated in the thousands (Wessler, 2011: 4) and possibly the tens of thousands. In a sample of 900 detainees, the Urban Institute and the National Council of La Raza found that “for every two immigrants apprehended, one child was left behind” (Capps et al., 2007: ii) and that two-thirds of these children were U.S. citizens. Since there are approximately 5 million children in the United States with at least one undocumented parent, millions may be at risk of forcible separation from their parents (Capps et al., 2007: 1). Harsh border enforcement against undocumented immigrants has resulted in a historic high of more than 1 million deportations in the past three years alone. The Office of Immigration Statistics reports that from October 1, 2009, to September 30, 2010, the Department of Homeland Security “removed 387,000 foreign nationals from the United States. The leading countries of origin of those removed were Mexico (73 percent), Guatemala (8 percent), Honduras (6 percent), and El Salvador (5 percent)” (U.S. Department of Homeland Security, 2011). Most low-income immigrants from Central America and Mexico are mixed-race or descendents of indigenous groups and therefore highly susceptible to racial profiling in the United States.

This article examines the social reproductive implications of the racialized and gendered practices intended to deter undocumented or unreported immigration to the United States. “Social reproduction” is here understood as the processes that contribute to maintaining and recreating communities on a daily and generational basis. In addition to families, educational and health systems, nongovernmental and for-profit organizations, and the state contribute to social reproduction. What is pivotal, however, is the mental, manual, and emotional work involved in pregnancy, childbearing, and the socialization of children, which is primarily unremunerated and performed by mothers, fathers, and other relatives at family sites. Together with other unpaid domestic work (e.g., laundry, cooking, shopping, cleaning), social reproduction at a family site is foundational in maintaining and reproducing the labor force necessary for the paid economy (see, e.g., Bezanson and Luxton, 2006). In addition, social reproduction in nuclear and extended families includes the transmission of cultural traditions, including class, sexual, gendered, religious, ethnic, racial, and national identities. For minority populations, social reproduction includes the formation of identities and the development of strategies to cope with and fight racism and resist cultural domination. The family is the quintessential site in which values and social customs and rites from language to eating habits and forms of social interaction—in sum, the legacy that parents transmit to their children through daily interactions—are learned and reproduced.

The thousands of undocumented immigrants who are deported each year include parents whose children end up in the foster care system, living on the streets or with relatives, friends, or neighbors, or deported. Many of these children are placed for adoption with U.S. families. When parents are taken away, children lose not only their source of protection and economic and emotional support but also, if the separation is long or permanent, their right to their cultural heritage and a meaningful relationship with their biological parents. As Capps et al. (2007: 1) point out, “Children are emotionally, financially, and developmentally dependent on their parents’ care, protection, and earnings.” The social reproduction of minority groups with distinctive cultural traditions is disrupted when children are separated from their parents for long periods or permanently.

Legally, such extended separation from parents can be justified only if parents are abusive or neglectful. As Adler et al. (2008: 1002) note, this principle is enshrined in U.S. jurisprudence: “The Supreme Court has developed procedural due process protections for parents at risk of termination of parental rights . . . requiring clear and convincing proof of neglect or abuse” (see also Yablon-Zug, 2011: 7–10). As we have seen, deportees have an uphill battle exercising their custodial and parental rights after deportation or during detention. After five years the Guatemalan mother Encarnación Bail Romero remains separated from her son. She was detained in a Carthage poultry plant in Missouri in 2007 after a raid by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), forcibly separated from her seven-month-old son, Carlitos, and sent to a federal prison in West Virginia for what the Supreme Court would later determine was not a criminal offense. Unable to participate in custody proceedings because she was in prison, Encarnación was judged to have “abandoned” her son, and her parental rights were terminated and her son’s name changed (Women’s Refugee Commission, 2011). In 2009, when she was finally released from prison, she initiated proceedings to be reunited with her child with the help of the Guatemala consulate and an NGO. The Supreme Court of Missouri ordered a retrial in January 2012.² As of April 2013 she and the now five-year-old Carlitos remain separated after a retrial in July 2012 again denied her parental rights. At this point, the courts are debating whether it is in the best interest of the child, who is a U.S. citizen, to remain with the family that adopted him or let him rejoin a mother in Guatemala who once crossed the border and worked undocumented in the United States (Women’s Refugee Commission, 2012).

The cases of Felipe, Cirila, and Encarnación have legal parallels with the better-known case of the Cuban child Elián González, whose Miami-based relatives argued that it was in his best interest to remain in the United States rather than return to Cuba, where his biological father was demanding reunification. Ultimately, parental rights trumped their argument. However, according to legal scholars Marcia Anne Yablon-Zug (2011) and Elizabeth Hall (2011), a pattern is emerging whereby it is considered to be in the best interest of the child of deported parents to remain in the United States in adoptive or foster homes. Few would argue that foster parenting and social services can adequately replace biological parents who are not neglectful or abusive. Even the best intentions of adoptive parents who provide love and care cannot replace the family and cultural heritage to which children are entitled and that parents have the right to transmit to their children.

The three cases discussed here, which are clearly just the tip of the iceberg, have been well publicized because these individuals had the good fortune to receive help from NGOs or their governments in claiming their rights. The number of undocumented parents who are able to engage in costly court procedures to fight for their parental rights over the children who have been taken away from them is undoubtedly small. An undocumented person who attempts illegal reentry to contest the termination of parental rights is likely to be arrested (Yablon-Zug, 2011: 15). In the unlikely event—unlikely because of prior unauthorized residence and low income—that such a parent were to obtain a temporary visa without a work permit, he or she might still be unable to demonstrate enough financial stability to cover the cost of raising a child according to ethnocentric U.S. standards. Custody battles in the courts are difficult even for resident/citizen parents who cannot demonstrate financial stability.

As this article goes to press, there is a bill in Congress on immigration reform that might permit those who arrived prior to 2011 to avoid the loss of parental rights through deportation. Facing harsh criticism from Latino communities, the Obama administration has signed executive orders emphasizing prosecutorial discretion to hasten deportations of criminals while avoiding illegal immigrants charged only with civil violations who have strong family bonds in the country. This executive order is in fact just an enforcement of the Immigration and Nationalization Act, Section §240A(b)(4), which states that cancellation of removal orders is available to any nonpermanent resident of any immigration status who “establishes that removal would result in ‘exceptional and extremely unusual hardship’ to the alien’s spouse, parent, or child who is a United States citizen or legal permanent resident.” This provision, however, has been interpreted by the authorities in very restrictive terms. Preston (2012) estimates that Obama’s executive order could result in the suspension of the deportation of about 39,000 immigrants nationwide. Although this would be an improvement, as Preston points out, these parents would remain in legal limbo, without the legal status to work or obtain a driver’s license, for instance, and thus would continue to struggle to subsist. In addition, in fall 2012, the Obama administration passed the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which for a US$465 paperwork fee grants successful applicants freedom from deportation for up to two years and a work permit. Applicants need to have come to the United States before they were 16 years old, be 30 or younger at the time of application, be high school graduates or in college or have served in the military, and lack a serious criminal record.

The removal of children from undocumented immigrant parents has a long history and is embedded in a political economic and institutional legal framework that promotes segregation and discrimination based on the categorization of people and families by race, nationality, citizenship, immigration status, income, language, and disability. One is reminded of what Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein (1991: 21) called the “new racism” of an “era of decolonization, of the reversal of population movements between the old colonies and the old metropolises, and the division of humanity within a single political space.” The new racism, they argue, includes segregationist social practices and discourses and representations that tend to legitimize exclusion, dehumanization, and stigmatizion of Others. Children of undocumented immigrants and their parents, like pieces in a chessboard game, can move only in very limited ways that severely restrict their enjoyment of their basic rights, such as the right to earn a living with basic labor entitlements, to parent one’s own biological children, and to have a meaningful relationship with one’s biological parents and other relatives. The practices, discourse, and institutional framework not only delegitimize the presence of undocumented manual laborers and their families but dehumanize them by denying them rights and a sense of belonging.

Exclusion, Segregation, and Hardship

Mexican immigration into the United States has been characterized by cycles that result from the sending of two different messages to prospective immigrants: welcoming “help wanted” messages to fulfill the need for underpaid manual labor, on the one hand, and “keep out” policies that impede their integration into U.S. society as equals, on the other. Migration from Mexico to the United States dates to the annexation of almost half of Mexico by the United States at the end of the Mexican-American War in 1848 and to the active recruitment of Mexican laborers into the United States (e.g., the Bracero Program) during different periods of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Mexican citizens have historically met the demand in the United States for cheap, accessible, and temporary manual labor in the class-, race-, and gender-segregated labor market. Most male Mexican laborers have found work in male-dominated occupations such agricultural work, landscaping, and construction, while most female Mexican workers have been employed in female-dominated occupations such as food processing, the garment and cleaning industries, and domestic service as maids, nannies, and caregivers for the elderly and the sick. Many of these jobs are informal and without benefits and security. In 2010, according to the U.S. Department of Labor (2011: 2), although Latinos accounted for 14 percent of all employed workers in the United States, they were “overrepresented by a substantial amount in several job categories, including drywall installers (59 percent), grounds maintenance workers (44 percent), construction laborers (43 percent), and maids and housekeeping cleaners (41 percent).” The 2011 median weekly earnings of Latino men and women are the lowest of any group of workers (Figure 1). When the work is informal and part-time at the lowest rank, earnings are even lower. In 2011 the median earnings of Latino men (US$571) were 59 percent of the median earnings of Asian men (US$970), and the median earnings of Latino women (US$518) were 69 percent of the median earnings of Asian women (US$751).

Figure 1.

Median weekly earnings of U.S. workers by gender and race, 2011 (U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2012).

Four decades of migration since the 1970s have brought 12 million documented and undocumented immigrants into the United States (Passel, Cohn, and Gonzalez, 2012). Mexico receives US$23,610 million a year in remittances from all Mexicans abroad, the majority in the United States. Remittances are a source of foreign exchange and 2.1 percent of Mexico’s gross domestic product (World Bank, 2012). More important, they are a significant source of income for the receiving families. Nonetheless, Passel et al. found that the historic wave of migration from Mexico to the United States is at a standstill. Between 2005 and 2010, 1.37 million Mexicans migrated to the United States, but 1.39 million, including deportees, migrated from the United States to Mexico. In comparison, from 1995 to 2000, 2.94 million Mexicans migrated to the United States, while 690,000 migrated to Mexico from the United States. The reasons for this reversal of the historical trend suggested by this study are high unemployment rates in the United States, recession in the construction sector, changing patterns of border enforcement, the escalation of violations of the human rights of migrants before crossing the border, and significantly lower fertility rates in Mexico. To this list should be added the increasing barriers to forming and sustaining families (e.g., the loss of parental rights and barriers to their children’s access to higher education) that make it increasingly difficult to provide the next generation with opportunities for social advancement. The dream of working hard to provide their families with opportunities not available in their home countries has been dimmed by forced family separation and may be one of the reasons fewer Mexicans and Central Americans are willing to migrate.

The increasing deportation rates have been justified in terms of national security and fear that drug-related violence in Mexico and Central America will spill over onto U.S. territory without strict border control. They have also been touted as cost-saving measures (e.g., in education, health, and police services) at a time of increasing fiscal deficits and foreign debt and as preserving job opportunities and security for deserving citizens and documented residents at a time of high unemployment. Yet anti-immigration laws and programs are also an expression of a widespread belief among the U.S. public and officials that the right of undocumented immigrants to equal protection under the law and due process need not be protected because they have brought their problems on themselves by breaking the law. What this argument fails to acknowledge is that obtaining a legal tourist or work visa to enter the United States is virtually impossible for low-income workers who cannot demonstrate financial stability or an offer of a job in the United States. To make a better future for themselves and their families, manual laborers must risk breaking the law (and, in many instances, breaking up their families) because no legitimate path of immigration is available to them (McDermott and Sanmiguel-Valderrama, 2013: 54).

Despite the historical U.S. reliance on Mexican laborers for manual work, a number of programs have been created to deter the immigration of low-income Mexican and Central American citizens that together translate into a system of exclusion, segregation, and hardship. These programs include the militarization of the Mexican–U.S. border through programs such as Operation Blockage (1993) and Operation Rio Grande (1997) in Texas, Operation Safeguard (1994) in Arizona, and Operation Gatekeeper in California (1994) (Nevins, 2010). According to the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, “as many as 8,000 migrant dead have been recovered on the U.S.–Mexico border since the U.S. government’s current ‘prevention through deterrence’ strategy was implemented in 1994. Human rights groups working to prevent migrant deaths and abuses on the border believe that for every migrant found dead at least ten others are missing in the desert” (NNIRR, 2010). Some researchers and advocates report an even darker picture of the situation. Johnson (2007: 112), for example, notes that “even before the 1990s, the Border Patrol had a reputation for committing human rights abuses against immigrants and U.S. citizens of Mexican ancestry. . . . The Border Patrol is plagued by reports of brutality, shootings, beatings, and killings.”

A recent case that exemplifies this brutality is the killing in May 2010 of 42-year-old Anastasio Hernández-Rojas, as reported by John Carlos Frey in a segment of PBS’s Need to Know aired on April 20, 2012 (Frey, 2012). Caught trying to cross the border near San Diego, Anastasio had previously lived in the United States for 25 years and was the father of five U.S.-born children. According to his widow, María Puga, he was trying to return to his family after being deported some days before. As Frey reported, “All eyewitnesses that we spoke to basically tell the same story of a man hogtied and handcuffed behind his back, not resisting, being beaten repeatedly by batons, by kicks, by punches, by the use of a taser, for almost 30 minutes until he died.” According to the documentary, the more than a dozen border agents involved in the incident remain in their jobs; María Puga has filed a civil suit against them for wrongful death (Democracy Now, 2012b).

Deportees also include unaccompanied children and minors, many of whom try for months to cross the border to get back to their families in the United States (Del Bosque, 2011). The Center for Public Policy Priorities estimates that 43,000 unaccompanied undocumented children are removed yearly from the United States. According to the same report, children of Mexican and Honduran nationality have reported abuse and mistreatment by Border Patrol officers, including inattention to repeated requests for medical attention, lack of access to water or food, having to sleep on the floor without a blanket in a heavily air-conditioned cell, not being allowed to contact family or a legal counsel, and being struck or knocked down by agents, handcuffed, and transported “like dogs” in kennel-like compartments (Thompson, 2008).

Nor are all deportees foreign nationals. Although they probably constitute less than 7 percent of all deportees, some are U.S. citizens, both adults and children (Zoghlin, 2010: 22). One recent example is the much-publicized case of a runaway 15-year-old girl, a U.S. citizen, deported to Colombia. The girl gave authorities an invented name that happened to match a name of an adult undocumented Colombian. Despite her age and fingerprinting procedures, the girl was assumed to be the adult Colombian undocumented immigrant and was left in the Colombian capital without means and without speaking the language or knowing anyone. The Colombian authorities, using the information given them by the U.S. authorities that she was an adult, provided identification and temporary housing and helped her to find a job. Six months passed before her U.S. grandmother was able to locate her through Facebook and initiate proceedings to bring her back to Texas (Democracy Now, 2012a). In this case a resolution was possible despite ICE’s obvious mistake, but clearly most children who are deported alone at tender ages, sometimes in the middle of the night, are unlikely to be able to prove their citizenship or contact a relative. Although there are treaties and procedures in place to facilitate repatriation between Mexico and the United States, services differ widely by geographical location along the border. Children separated from their families are vulnerable to ending up as sex slaves or being used for drug smuggling or other illegal and degrading purposes.

But the risks of undocumented immigration into the United States precede would-be immigrants’ arrival at the Mexican-U.S. border. Increasingly, in the era of greater border enforcement, this population depends on criminal and drug gangs that promise safe passage for a high fee. As a result, thousands of low-income migrants are robbed, physically and sexually assaulted, kidnapped, and murdered by traffickers and criminals on their way into the United States. Recently, for example, 72 migrants (58 men and 14 women) were massacred in Tamaulipas, close to the U.S. border. A wounded Ecuadorean who was the only survivor testified that the massacre had been carried out by a Mexican drug cartel gang known as the Zetas, which, “started by former Mexican Army Special Forces soldiers, is known to extort money from migrants who pass through its territory” (Associated Press, 2010). In a similar news story, 68 mutilated bodies, again attributed to the Zetas, were found just south of the Texas border (Memmott, 2012).

Nor do the risks of undocumented immigration end after crossing the border. Increasingly, border enforcement is moving inland, and immigration raids are taking place in the workplace, the home, and the school and on the highway. One of the ways in which the United States responded to the attacks of September 11, 2001, was passing the 2005 Real ID Act, which requires states to request proof of identity and U.S. citizenship or legal status of persons applying for identification cards and driver’s licenses, verify source documents provided by applicants, and establish specified security standards for officers who issue such forms of identification (Denning, 2009). While opposed by officials in 25 states, the act has been fully or partially implemented in others, such as North Carolina and Illinois (ACLU, 2012b). Unauthorized immigrants are ineligible to obtain driver’s licenses, learner’s permits, or identification cards, which greatly limits their capacity to open a bank account, get a library card, or board an airplane, among other acts of everyday life. Not being able to renew a driver’s license was one of the reasons that led Felipe Montes to break the law. Since he lived in a rural area, he had to drive to transport his kids to day care and himself to work.

An additional way in which the legal system has undermined the protection of the law of this underclass of low-wage Latino migrants is by leaving them without the right of collective bargaining (Ruiz-Cameron, 2003: 24). In 2002 the Supreme Court ruled in Hoffman Plastic Compounds, Inc. v. National Labor Relations Board that, since undocumented individuals were in violation of federal immigration law, they were not entitled to collect compensation for being illegally fired for having joined a union. This ruling left this population vulnerable to employers’ abuses, which could range from wages lower than the official minimum to lack of protection from sexual harassment or other substandard working conditions. Fear of being deported inhibits an undocumented worker from demanding basic labor rights (Southern Poverty Law Center, 2013).

Another interior enforcement plan is the federal program Secure Communities, created in 2008 by the George W. Bush administration. It requires state or local law enforcement agencies to share with ICE the fingerprints of persons arrested, even when the violations are minor or the charges are eventually dismissed, so that it can determine the immigration status of the individual arrestee. “Since the sharing of fingerprints takes place upon arrest rather than conviction by a court of law, the program has resulted in the detention and deportation of hundreds of thousands of people with no criminal records, even though the program was intended to focus strictly on dangerous criminals” (McDermott and Sanmiguel-Valderrama, 2013: 51). Advocates of a rights coalition conclude that “the Program functions as a ‘dragnet,’ funneling individuals into a highly flawed detention and removal system; 79% of those caught in the Program’s net are not criminals or were picked up for minor offenses; the Program serves as a smokescreen for racial profiling, allowing police officers to make arrests that could lead to deportations, rather than to convictions” (Zoghlin, 2010: 29).

Most detainees are deported in a day or two after their arrest, while others remain in detention for months or even years pending deportation procedures. During 2010, the average daily detention population was 30,885. Of these, 61 percent were from Mexico, followed by detainees from El Salvador (11 percent), Guatemala (10 percent), and Honduras (8 percent) (U.S. Department of Homeland Security, 2011). The human rights violations suffered by those detained have been documented by NGOs such as the American Civil Liberties Union: “The people locked up in the patchwork of jails and prisons that make up the nation’s immigration detention system are exposed to myriad abuses—from a lack of adequate medical and mental health care that has led to numerous unnecessary deaths to the burgeoning problem of sexual abuse of detainees” (ACLU, 2012a). Additionally, the documentary “Lost in Detention,” aired by PBS’s Frontline on October 18, 2011, reported that detainees are without translators or attorneys and deprived of basic due process and women are “harassed for sexual favors, guards taking detainees and beating them, [and] running them down like they were animals” (PBS, 2011).

Secure Communities works in conjunction with the 287(g) Program, which allows ICE to train local law enforcement officers to enforce federal immigration law as authorized by Section 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act. In some jurisdictions, sheriffs and police chiefs have quit their jobs in protest over the measures or opted out of the program altogether, although whether opting out is legal is currently a matter of dispute. Some police departments believe that their involvement in immigration enforcement is likely to have a chilling effect on both documented and undocumented immigrants’ reporting criminal activity or assisting police in criminal investigations (either as witnesses or as victims), thereby enabling criminals to continue unrestricted in the community (Zoghlin, 2010). Even the U.S. Homeland Security Advisory Council (2011) admits that building trust among members of the community and the authorities is fundamental to public safety. Despite these findings, the Department of Homeland Security plans to implement the program nationwide.

In conjunction with Secure Communities, in June 2012 a provision known as “Show Me Your Papers” survived a constitutional challenge before the Supreme Court of Arizona’s 2010 anti-immigration law. The provision allows police to inquire about the immigration status of anyone they suspect of being undocumented. Such a suspicion could be triggered by racial profiling in terms of accent, skin color, or physical appearance. Other controversial provisions of Arizona’s anti-immigration law were declared unconstitutional (e.g., arresting someone for undocumented presence or for working without authorization in the United States, reinforcing the federal authorities’ jurisdiction over immigration), by precedent invalidating similar provisions of anti-immigration laws passed in 2010 and 2011 in Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, Utah, and South Carolina.

The programs and measures described thus reinforce restrictions on the movement of labor under the regulations of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Dominican Republic–Central American Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA), which promote economic integration by encouraging the free movement of capital, goods, and services to sites in which the free market is most likely to generate profits and economic growth while severely restricting the free movement of people in search of the best market conditions to generate income. Both agreements allow management-level employees and highly skilled individuals to cross borders temporarily for trade- or investment-related activities, while manual laborers are not afforded this preferential treatment (McDermott and Sanmiguel-Valderrama, 2013: 40). To cross the border legally, Mexican and Central American immigrants must apply for one of the limited number of temporary work visas obtainable through general programs available to any other citizen of an eligible country, and these are virtually impossible for manual laborers to obtain.

Conclusion

In the North American context characterized by regional neoliberal economic integration sanctioned under NAFTA and DR-CAFTA, which create a geopolitical space “in which entire populations subject to the law of the market come into contact physically and symbolically” (Balibar and Wallerstein, 1991: 43), the state plays a central role in regulating and perpetuating social and economic hierarchies among groups of people interacting in this transnational space and in creating “deserving” and “undeserving” populations (one with rights and one without). The physical and emotional suffering of Mexican and Central American immigrant manual laborers and their families in the United States, in the words of Pierre Bourdieu (2004: xiv), “obliges us to rethink completely the question of the legitimate foundations of citizenship and of relations between citizen and the state, nation or nationality.” The discourse and practices around constructions of borders/frontiers, citizenship, nationalities, and ethnicities, including the characterization of people as “alien undocumented immigrants,” are used to create and perpetuate practices of what Balibar and Wallerstein called the new racism. They serve to maintain oppressive social and economic hierarchies, granting or denying rights to a diverse subset of workers in an integrated transnational space.

The recent wave of exclusionary reforms, detentions, and deportations would seem to fly in the face of the historical presence and productivity of this racialized and gendered labor force in the United States. The absence of immigration laws that recognize their multiple contributions forces these workers into an undocumented status that strengthens racial and class-based boundaries and privileges and disadvantages (De Genova and Peutz, 2010). The exclusionary regime clearly makes life as an undocumented manual laborer of Mexican and Central American origin in the United States very difficult.

The legal regime described here has created a system of segregation and exclusion of a subordinated minority group of color that is reminiscent of the institutionalized racism faced by other immigrants and U.S. racial minorities in the past, through which, as Bonacich, Alimahomed, and Wilson (2008: 343) state, communities were “cordoned off for distinct, exclusionary treatment, typically based on a combination of perceived physical appearance and putative ancestry.” Such has been the case for aboriginal groups in the United States, Canada, and Australia who have fallen victim to systems such as residential boarding schools that forcibly separated children from their parents in order to impose the dominant culture on them (Schissel and Wotherspoon, 2003), of African Americans, who through slavery were prevented from forming families, and of the Chinese men brought into the United States to build the transcontinental railroad and work in mining at the end of the nineteenth century but denied equal rights by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Today those historical policies are recognized as forms of cultural genocide, violent racist practices whose painful consequences are still felt by members of the affected communities.

The institutionalized neoracism currently experienced by Mexican and Central American citizens from low-income backgrounds in the United States serves the purpose of more effectively exploiting their labor power. As in the past, denying them equal access to labor markets has increased the vulnerability of undocumented immigrants, who, fearing deportation, abstain from contacting the authorities to protect them from violations of their rights in areas such as labor, housing, domestic violence, discrimination in schools, and other civil or criminal administrative or court procedures. Immigrants’ social reproductive processes have been compromised, if not denied altogether, placing at risk the survival of their communities both in the United States and in their countries of origin. This is particularly evident in the forced separation of families and the severing of parental rights as well as the detentions and deaths at the border and in detention centers. By expelling individuals without regard to their roles as parents, workers, and members of their communities, this exclusionary regime severely limits human mobility not only physically but socioeconomically.

The only way to avoid continued complicity in these self-serving and racist violations of human rights is for Congress to enact comprehensive immigration reform that recognizes the historical need for and presence of Mexican and Central American manual laborers in the United States. Consistent with their historical contributions, programs and policies targeted at this subset of workers should be designed and implemented to allow them to live their lives in a framework of legitimacy and full recognition of their rights as human beings, workers, and contributors to both Mexican and U.S. communities and economies. The cases of Felipe, Cirila, Encarnación, and Anastasio highlight the need to safeguard not only the parental rights of undocumented immigrants but all of their human rights, regardless of ethnicity, nationality and citizenship.

Footnotes

Notes

Olga Sanmiguel-Valderrama is an assistant professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Cincinnati. She specializes in the impact of neoliberal trade regimes on human rights, particularly those of racial minorities, workers, and women.

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