States of Emergency: New Writing on Deportation and Democracy

Vas a cruzar y a vas a mojarte y vas a rifártela contra gente cabrona; te desesperás, cómo no, verás maravillas y al fin encontrarás a tu hermano, a aunque estés triste llegarás a donde debes llegar.

—Yuri Herrera, Señales que precederán el fin del mundo

As national economies boiled in the cauldron of the global financial crisis that began in 2008, observers were slow to acknowledge the growing xenophobic backlash against migrants and refugees seeking shelter and survival wages across borders. In the North Atlantic and Mediterranean world where in the 1990s and early 2000s norms of exclusionary and Euro-white racial citizenship had been giving way to multicultural ideals, centrists found themselves pulled rightward by nativist challengers promising to erect new walls and border reinforcements, narrow the window for asylum seekers, and ban Islamic dress or displays of religiosity in schools or public places. Even countries historically defined by out-migration such as Ireland and Italy, where diasporas had been part of the imagined national community, had become startlingly hostile to migrants from other countries.

Meanwhile, in the United States, the impulse to exclude newcomers similarly crossed ideological and partisan boundaries. The centrist Obama administration sought political leverage from the right for its action on health care and trillion-dollar economic stimulus package by throwing nativism a bone. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security doubled the pace of deportation from the previous administration, removing a staggering 400,000 people per year—a Wyoming’s worth of people every 15 months. The numbers of forced removals of migrants after 2000 were a sharp departure from previous decades since the end of World War II. By comparison, the United States had deported 30,000 people in 1990 under President George H. W. Bush. Immigration at that time was, at least in federal government circles, a nonissue: less than 1 percent of respondents to the benchmark Roper Poll named immigration the “most important problem” facing the United States (CBS News and The New York Times, 2010). By contrast, Gallup, Inc. (2016) reported that in 2016 the number of respondents identifying immigration as the nation’s most important problem varied between 10 and 15 percent.

While politicians, voters, and the media have expended a mountain of energy and words on immigration and refugee policy—debating ad infinitum whether immigration is good or bad for wages or the economy or the tax base or the national character—they have paid minuscule attention to what militarized immigration control means for democracy itself. In the 1980s and 1990s, theorists of law institutions such as Linz and Stepan (1996), Karl (1990), and O’Donnell (1994) gave useful thought to the factors shaping regime transitions to and away from democracy in the late twentieth century; however, they did not consider the possibility that consolidated democracies might fray over the polarization generated by the question of extending political and social membership to people arriving from poorer regions where state and criminal violence threatened or undermined democracy. The term “authoritarian enclave” was coined by Manuel Garretón (1991) to describe the institutional exclusions and statutory bans that were meant to limit the democratic game after Pinochet’s exit from the presidency in Chile in 1990. Today it could usefully be applied to the set of laws and policing arrangements in the United States that is meant to prevent, in small or great measure, the participation in politics, markets, and public life of 22 million noncitizen residents and workers. It is worth considering what to label a regime condition characterized by millions of workers—anywhere from 20 to 70 percent of high-risk agricultural or building industry workforces—living out their lives with no path to citizenship and, in many cases, no legal right to perform the most basic of life-sustaining activities (DeSilver, 2017; Serrano, 2012). Pro-immigrant activists argue that “no human being is illegal,” but the condition of being subject to removal at any time and any place, not being fully authorized by law to collect a paycheck for work performed, having no right to drive, and having no ability to draw on the pension or old-age medical benefits one has paid into national coffers is indeed experienced as the inhabitation of an illicit body.

Despite its claim to the study of regime dynamics and regime types, comparative political science lacks an adequate typology for regimes like the United States that are characterized at once by regular elections and civilian rule and by widespread disenfranchisement of adults through mass incarceration, racial profiling in law enforcement, and criminalization of unauthorized migrants and yet-to-be-authorized migrants. The social science that actually succeeds in showing how the problem of exclusionary membership corrodes democratic institutions in an age when states have officially disavowed race-based citizenship rights (FitzGerald and Cook-Martín, 2014) is ultimately Foucaultian or Arendtian in its approach. Foucaultian questions apply to the fact that vulnerable bodies are governed not just by containing physical structures and myriad forms of surveillance but also by the constant invocation of national laws that delineate one side of a mapped line from another. What does it mean for people with often-identical life goals, career pursuits, and civic values to have starkly different sets of rights and claims on the state because of the documents and numbers attached to their biometrically registered persons? Arendtian questions apply to the lumbering and violent bureaucratic machinery that controls immigrants and their movements and pursuits. Arendt’s claim that bureaucracy is, by design, “rule by nobody”—not no rule but a tyranny characterized by a system in which life-and-death decisions are arbitrary and indisputable. What does it mean for some cases to wind through a labyrinth of faceless courts and registries and fee-collecting agencies for years and produce invitations to citizenship, only for others to produce orders of deportation and a militarized phalanx of border patrol agents at one’s kitchen door one morning?

Words come to mind: erasure, negation, state disappearance. Borders are, ostensibly, specific places on maps, but in terms of the power they exert they are self-replicating engrams embedded in the minds of all the people, citizen and noncitizen, contained by them. Describing this psychogeography requires genre-bending work that traverses fiction, fact, and even subterranean imaginaries of where life and death intersect.

Nearly a decade ago, the Mexican writer and political scientist Yuri Herrera may have found a conceptual passageway connecting two valuable but incommensurable literatures—one set of writings discussing the subjective condition of being a migrant and another discussing the physical and legal systems set up to control migration. Herrera set ablaze the world of Hispanophone letters with his novel Señales que precederán el fin del mundo. Despite its impact in Spain and Latin America, the title went unnoticed by English-language presses until 2015, when the Emory University professor Lisa Dillman translated and published the English version with the nonprofit, subscriber-supported And Other Stories Press. In the novel, translated as Signs Preceding the End of the World, Makina, a young woman from an unnamed village “riddled with bullet holes and tunnels bored by five centuries of voracious silver lust” (11), is sent by her mother to bring her brother back from the United States, referred to simply as “the other side.” The story is at once a border-crossing narrative and a retelling of the journey of common souls in the Aztec world traveling into Mictlán, an underworld of nine levels to the north where ultimately the dead would reside, extinct and without memory or identity, in an obsidian room with no doors or windows—the realm of the feared deity Mictlantecuhtli.

What is extraordinary about Herrera’s novel is its confrontation of migration as an inherently violent and subtractive process as souls pass through each level of the journey. There are the thieves and sicarios and border guards who threaten Makina at every turn, but there is also the killing desert itself, which insinuates itself into the journey with the specter of cadavers and stories of death. Ultimately, the actions that the migrant takes to survive the crossing result in one way or another in the abandonment of identity and volition. “What do people whose life stops here take with them?” Makina asks as she prepares a rucksack for the crossing. After crossing the river and clambering over eight hills to reach a city of sorts, a “steel-girder plain” on which she sees her compatriots “scattered about like bolts fallen from a window: on street corners, on scaffolding, on sidewalks” (57). She finally finds her brother on a military base with a gringo name and identity that he has acquired for a price: he has agreed to fight in a foreign war in the place of an American deserter in exchange for his name and his papers: “All of a sudden he had money and a new name, but no clue what to do, where to go, what the path of the person with that name should be” (92). Even for those who manage to cross the river, the passage itself dehumanizes. “We forget what we came for,” the brother explains, “but there’s this reflex to act like we still have some secret plan” (93).

This is a Foucaultian work designed to trouble: Herrera’s brutal style insists that the reader examine her or his interest in a story of war and violence such as this novel is. The intimacy of accompanying the protagonist to Mictlán and witnessing the obliteration of her soul leaves one with the sense of having played the voyeur. As Susan Sontag (2002) famously argued of war photography, looking at death on a two-dimensional page is, for anyone not in a position to intervene, a morally questionable act. Seemingly aware of this, Herrera’s prose maintains a careful opacity that keeps the reader distant, as if behind a thick wall of smoky glass. He offers no last names, no placenames, no family details, and only the barest physical descriptions of the characters, as if to say to the reader, “These migrants who die and disappear in the passage northward are not for you to know. You forget even their names, so don’t think you can consume their stories and recount them as if they were your own.” Of Makina the reader ultimately knows only that she exists, that she is sentient, and that she is capable of suffering like all other sentient beings.

In The Weight of Shadows: A Memoir of Immigration and Displacement, José Orduña has written a bookend to Herrera’s underworld epic migrant odyssey in a highly promising debut work. Whereas in Herrera’s tale the protagonist begins in Mexico and journeys north, her brother, and her ultimate erasure, Orduña begins his story in Chicago, the city where he was taken by his mother as a baby, and wends his way through a faceless and alienating naturalization process. Much as Arendt (1963) argued controversially in Eichmann in Jerusalem, the violence and racism of the deportation state is self-replicating—built into the basic career mandates and incentives of the bureaucrats and agents who routinely do their jobs, often tearing apart lives with unmarked white vans, plastic handcuffs, and sheets of paper. Orduña passes through the bottleneck of immigration restriction thanks to a green card obtained for him by his father many years before through a loophole in the Reagan-era Immigration Reform and Control Act of the mid-1980s. He finds no peace with his new identity as a U.S. citizen, however, and is wracked with survivor’s guilt for having received the membership prize that many of his immigrant friends and coworkers will never obtain. “This year,” he writes of the official Homeland Security envelope that arrives on February 14, “the immigration document is my only valentine, and it feels like I’m trapped in an abusive relationship with a sociopath” (48). Unmoored and drinking heavily, Orduña ultimately finds himself pulled southward to the United States–Mexico borderlands.

The most beautiful and searing parts of the book are the last two chapters, in which Orduña describes his work with the volunteer group No More Deaths administering medical help to dehydrated and wounded migrants and setting out canisters of water for other crossers in a remote part of the Arizona desert where untold thousands of migrants have perished. After his work with No More Deaths, he volunteers across the border in Mexico, ministering to migrants who have been deported and deposited penniless and often desperate in border cities where they seldom have contacts. Up to these two chapters, Orduña’s book is stylish but almost forgettable in its reliance on now-standard memoir-genre fare—descriptions of rakish benders with working- class friends who admire but don’t understand his impulse to write and passages describing hungover daytime melancholia born of unresolved issues with his father. But in the desert Orduña’s story transcends the ordinary good-enough-for-commercial-press memoir. In the desert and on the border he finds ferocious purpose.

The book’s title comes from his meditation on the desperate people he ministers to and the disappared migrants he cannot reach. Echoing Herrera’s protagonist, he describes the artifacts of the lost souls he stumbles across in the desert—shirts, shoes, rucksacks. Shadows have weight, he concludes: “Whatever body filled that sweatshirt, and whatever life animated that body, refused to be unseen even in its absence” (188). Thumbing through a coffee-table book one day, Orduña has an epiphany when he comes across the 1962 Remedios Vara painting Fenómeno, in which a standing three-dimensional shadow casts a two-dimensional image of a man on a staircase. The surrealist painting describes what language cannot for him: the migrant vaporized in body and identity by the militarized border and the deportation apparatus. Echoing Herrera’s take on the matter, he calls it disappearance by design. “What happens to migrants in the Sonoran Desert, and long before they get to the desert, is not an accident—it’s the letter of spirit and of policy” (189). Recalling an episode in which he provides what little help he can in Agua Prieta to two deported migrants from Oaxaca, he writes, “I think about the the severity of a woman as pregnant as Angela walking through the desert, about what has to be true in the consciousness of ordinary Americans in order for this to happen, and about how the couple’s journey to this place began by being dislodged and displaced from somewhere they used to know as home” (186). It is, he writes a kind of disappearance, “one that begins in place, without the vacating of a body” (189).

It says a great deal about this moment in time that much of the emerging literature on immigration is focused on the now mammoth archipelago of paramilitary police agencies, prisons, and often-faceless judges (especially with mass processing of deportees administered through video feeds) who enforce borders and the boundaries of citizenship in the world’s wealthy countries. In much of the immigration literature of the 1970s through early 2000s, immigration was characterized by scholars through ethnographic work on migration networks and through large-N data sets—studies of dollars or euros crossing borders, of people’s decisions to stay in host countries or to shuttle back and forth from countries of origin, of the kinds of jobs pursued successfully by migrants, of networks of migrants charting paths of movement, and of the trajectories of immigrant families through successive generations in residence in new destinations. But even the authors of now-classic studies of immigration are focusing increasing attention on the violence of immigration: notably, one of the uber-respectable grandfathers of large-N immigration sociology, the National Academy of Science member Douglas Massey, consented to write the afterword to Robert Schenkkan’s (2017) horrifying dystopian play Building the Wall, about an immigrant prison manager who solves an overcrowding problem in the wake of stepped-up deportation measures called for by President Trump by massacring deportees in makeshift gas chambers. “Donald Trump’s call for the construction of a continuous wall along the Mexico-U.S. border,” Massey (2017: 109) writes, “has little to do with the control of immigration and everything to do with the symbolic politics of white nationalism.”

Three new titles by the sociologist Tanya Maria Golash-Boza, the political scientist Wendy Brown (an updated second edition of a work written a decade prior), and the journalist Eileen Truax redouble new trends, showing that deportation is not a peripheral phenomenon but a subject worthy of independent consideration in its political-institutional, economic, and social psychological dimensions. Golash-Boza’s Deported: Immigrant Policing, Disposable Labor, and Global Capitalism opens with a fine piece of scholarship on the gears of deportation. She shows that deportation is very much a resource-driven phenomenon in which rapid escalation of border agency budgets drove a militarization of immigration enforcement practices. She demonstrates that in the decades since the 1960s the number of people deported was relatively low as a percentage of immigrants seeking residence. Then, in a wave of what she points out was a media-fueled period of racialized fear related to crime (7), the U.S. Congress passed an omnibus immigration act in 1996, the misshapenly titled Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act. This, along with antiterrorist legislation following the September 11 attacks, put tens of billions of dollars in the hands of police and military agencies charged with border security and immigration law enforcement. Golash-Boza argues convincingly that border and immigration control was the shadow twin to mass incarceration. Federal drug sentencing laws for nonviolent crimes passed in the early 1990s compounded the measures in the 1996 immigration control act. Now noncitizen minor drug offenders faced felony charges and mandatory sentencing and then deportation following jail terms. Additionally, undocumented immigration or “unlawful presence” was criminalized, leading to summary deportation of hundreds of thousands of migrants with bans of three to ten years on reentry.

Golash-Boza’s book, drawn from 147 interviews of deportees from the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Brazil, and Jamaica, is sobering reading. She presents her subjects’ immigration and deportation stories in chapters that chronicle racialization, stigma, and grotesque overpolicing. The chapters are sequential, organized as growing up, crossing over, becoming (black and Latino) American, the War on Drugs, getting caught, living behind bars, and rebuilding lives back home. Recalling Judith Hellman’s story-driven The World of Mexican Migrants: The Rock and the Hard Place (2009), Golash-Boza utilizes narrative to show both a range of experiences and the operation of general state processes. As a result of the number of cases she is juggling, she does not do as well as Hellman in drawing out the arc of immigrants’ experiences and the reasons the characters in her account make the decisions they do. Story lines are taken up and dropped in the middle of chapters; characters come and go. One has the impression that she gathered a mountain of field data without a clear sense of whether it would all fit in a single book-length study.

Golash-Boza also at times seems in search of a convincing thesis: she offers a theoretical argument that her cases illustrate that “mass deportation of men of color is part of the neoliberal cycle of global capitalism.” Stepped-up immigration enforcement, she contends, “is a policy response designed to relocate surplus labor to the periphery and to keep labor in the United States compliant” (5). She further argues the U.S. public passively accepts this course of action because “it targets mainly immigrant men of color, who are perceived to be expendable in the current economy and unwanted in the broader society” (6). This latter contention is the most problematic part of her argument. It is tempting, using world-systems logic, to conclude that the combination of Draconian drug sentencing laws, weaponized borders, massive policing budgets, and systematic racial profiling and discrimination in the deportation complex are proof of an instrumental and top-down plan to control black and Latino bodies. This is a parsimonious systems argument, but it is unsupportable. As evidenced by the many captains of corporate industry who champion liberal immigration regimes at places like the World Economic Forum in Davos, militarized immigration policy is not important for the functioning of neoliberalism capitalism. Any tour of a Midwest slaughterhouse or a prison manufacturing facility or a San Bernardino warehouse complex will show that global capital has the capacity to force workers to compete for the lowest wages and worst working conditions anywhere. The threat of deportation may be a convenient tool for mid-level managers, but ultimately the deportation apparatus is clunky as a workplace obeisance structure.

Why indeed has deportation reached the levels it has? Why are hundreds of thousands of people being put into the removal machinery on pretexts no more criminal than having an expired license plate or not having come to a full stop at a stop sign? Evidence points to a more sinister conclusion: lawmakers do not criminalize immigration because citizens do not notice or care; instead, they criminalize immigration because this has proven wildly popular among a sector of highly mobilized voters. A $30 billion deporation apparatus is not a quiet plan imposed from above for the sake of increasing returns to capital; it is an interactive show meant for the laboring and embattled middle classes who experience neoliberal capitalism as a total loss of control over their lives.

In the updated edition of her groundbreaking book Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, Wendy Brown offers a different take on the connections beween late global capitalism and the militarization of national borders that I find convincing. Brown focuses on the apparent paradox of states’ pursuing globalized trade and communication at the same time that they are erecting ever-more-lethal physical walls and barriers at their borders. In a manner that intersects with Golash-Boza’s arguments on racialization and mass incarceration, Brown argues that the structures produced for and presented to the public as mechanisms of law enforcement are in fact generating crime. Focusing on the crime produced by the opportunities for profit that walls and physical barriers generate, Brown argues that border walls create new vigilantisms, stronger smuggling mafias, and potentially funding for terrorism (10). Also, because walls fail to produce the economic security and social protections that eager xenophobic voters seek, the same border-enforcement structures create an intensification of ultranationalism (10).

Brown’s argument about border enforcement and neoliberalism differs from Golash-Boza’s in her contention that the traumatic disruptions associated with neoliberalism cause a psychological need for structures that would appear to include globalization. As flows of capital over borders and into offshore redoubts diminish the capacity of governments to provide basic protections to the society, she argues, walls stage sovereignty, and sovereignty is not a political and therefore contestable arrangement but a prepolitical and theological proposition. “If they perversely institutionalize the contested and degraded status of the boundaries they limn, walls . . . bear the irony of being mute, material, and prosaic, yet potentially generative of theological awe largely unrelated to their quotidian functions or failures” (38). Walls therefore provide “a visual emblem of power and protection that states increasingly cannot provide and generat[e] an imaginary of stable and homogeneous (and sometimes white supremacist) nationhood concretely eroded by global flows of capital, power, people, finance, ideas, cultures, religions, goods, and terror” (9).

Reading Brown or Golash-Boza, or Orduña or Herrera for that matter, one might arrive at the conclusion that the future portends indefinite expansion and reinforcement of the paramilitary deportation complex and the lethal physical boundaries separating South from North. In Dreamers: An Immigrant Generation’s Fight for Their American Dream, Eileen Truax pushes back in a clear-eyed account of the national social movement of young immigrants pressing for measures that would enable them to access the same opportunities for higher education and work as their school-aged peers. The DREAMers, as they called themselves after the so-called Dream Acts (first introduced in Congress in 2001 by Illinois Democrat Luis Gutierrez in the House of Representatives and by Utah Republican Orrin Hatch and Illinois Democrat Dick Durbin in the Senate), gained increasing support during a decade when border enforcement reached all-time highs. This was in no small part due to DREAMers’ radical acts of civil disobedience at this very juncture. The sense of total commitment among the DREAMers facing prison, violence, and even deportation in pursuit of a collective path to citizenship is all the more apparent from their ages. Many of them are under 18 and still legally children. Truax’s description of protesting DREAMers inviting arrest in places like Maricopa County, Arizona, belies the not-uncommon lament of civil-rights- and anti-Vietnam-War-generation activists that young people today lack commitment to direct action. In fact, the gallows humor Truax describes among the most vulnerable DREAMers preparing for confrontation with police recalls the fatalist exuberance of AIDS activists in the 1980s: “The group in Arizona exuded a happiness that seemed almost unnatural under the circumstances. Maybe it was their youth, or maybe their light attitude was a function of having grown accustomed to living under the constant threat of being harassed and, worse, by a sheriff [Joe Arpaio] who seems to believe he is the king of the county” (115).

Truax’s book is absorbing reading. Its title, however, is misleading. This is not a book-length study of a social movement. There are glimpses of its leadership, its lobbying strategies, its means of mobilizing support, and its engagement with the mass media, but a full biography of the DREAMer movement has yet to be written. Instead, this book is a set of 10 almost stand-alone articles that portray different DREAMers’ experiences of life inside and outside the movement, as well as some critical moments in the chronology of events between the beginnings of the movement and the 2012 DACA order under Obama that offered a stopgap reprieve from deportation and work prohibition for DREAMers. The movement, Truax shows, is nationwide: she visits with DREAMers in Texas, Alabama, California, and Arizona, discussing the diversity of the movement and some of the very real differences in DREAMers’ political goals. She also talks about the difficulties of occupying stigmatized identities: the burdens of Docuqueers having to, as they put it, come out twice. Truax’s account also crosses the border: one of the most heartbreaking parts of the book is the story of Nancy Landa, a young woman raised from childhood in the United States with a college degree from California State Northridge who was pulled over by ICE agents on her way to work in Long Beach, California. With no time to prepare any of her finances or gather any possessions, she was detained and summarily deported to Tijuana. Truax relates her story of wandering the streets with no identification, no contacts, and only a cell phone with a battery winding down. She would eventually build a life in Tijuana over the coming months with help from a network of U.S. friends who shuttled cash from her bank account, her possessions, and moral support to her across the border. She wonders aloud to Truax what must be happening with the thousands of other deportees such as herself with no memory of their countries of birth and far fewer resources. What untold dangers and difficulties lie ahead for those individuals?

As these five works show, debates on immigration are also debates about the boundaries of democracy in an increasingly unequal and exploitative global economy. Works that focus on the migrant as a human subject whose rights are lost in space peel away the official conceit that immigration policy is like any other routine distributive question. Given that immigrants without papers are increasingly subject to lengthy incarceration, separation from family members, and physical abuse, it is a morally bankrupt argument that immigration policies, including refugee and asylum policies, are appropriately crafted using the same partisan and bureaucratic calculus as is used to determine, say, the national income tax schedule or the public utilities code or the farm bill. How indeed does one convey the shattering seriousness of what it means for 65 million people around the world to be refugees in 2018 (United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner, 2018)? And for another 30 million worldwide to be undocumented?