Abstract
Over the past 20 years, global borders have increasingly turned into sites of mass death for thousands of people attempting to escape war, famine, genocide, and other human-made catastrophes. This humanitarian tragedy is unfolding simultaneously at the four corners of the globe. Everywhere, it is met with a deadly mix of hostility from national governments anxious to protect their territories against unwanted migrants and refugees and of relative indifference from international bodies, which are powerless to enforce international human rights. According to UNITED for Intercultural Action (2015), an NGO based in Amsterdam, between 1993 and 2015 approximately 23,000 migrants died at the southern borders of the European Union. Official data from the Department of Homeland Security (2016) reveal that between 1998 and 2015, close to 6,600 people lost their lives while attempting to cross the southwestern border of the United States. Finally, data gathered by the Border Crossing Observatory (2016) indicate that 1986 people died at the Australian border between 2000 and 2016. Overall, in the course of two decades close to 31,600 human beings perished at the frontiers of the Western world—more than ten times the toll of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York. And this is an extremely conservative estimate, as it does not include the thousands of deaths occurring every year at other borders (e.g. Asia, Africa, and Latin America) nor the thousands of migrants who disappeared during their long and perilous journey to reach those borders.
These grim statistics alone would be enough to make the case that Rethinking Border Control for a Globalizing World: A Preferred Future (2015) is a timely and necessary book. Yet, this collection also emerges as an innovative and original contribution to the expanding field of border studies. Its originality resides in the particular approach adopted by the contributors to the volume: a thought experiment in which they attempt to envision a “preferred future” for global borders. Instead of simply denouncing the deadly and oppressive nature of contemporary borders, contributors were asked to exercise their sociological imagination and explore possible pathways towards a future in which global borders—although not necessarily abolished—may become more relaxed, more humane, and ultimately less deadly (pp. 9–13). This is a promising approach informed by what Leanne Weber—the volume's editor—defines as “judicious reformism” (p. 12), a perspective that should be applied also to other social practices and institutions known to produce suffering and death, such as imprisonment, policing, immigrant detention, and so on. Indeed, in all these fields, we would need to engage with the task of imagining “realistic utopias” (p. 170), or envisioning solutions that might eschew the pitfalls of purely utopian scenarios while rejecting the narrowness of merely technical fixes. Ultimately, the powerful message emerging from this collection of essays is a healthy exhortation to keep realism and utopia together, as we try to envision a better future: “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will,” to borrow from Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci.
Another significant indicator of the relevance of this book, particularly for US-based readers, is that an increasing criminalization of immigration control—with the corollary of immigrant detentions, deportations, surveillance, etc.—might well represent the future (although clearly not the preferred one) of mass incarceration in the United States. Under the Obama administration, even as the country was witnessing timid efforts to reform the carceral state and address a dramatic prison crisis, immigrant detentions and deportations were soaring to unprecedented levels, and multinational corporations like GEO group and CCA were quickly shifting their investments from prisons to immigration detention centers, holding facilities, processing centers, and border surveillance technologies. In this scenario, the struggle against deadly borders should clearly represent an integral element of a broader movement of resistance against the penal state.
As they investigate both the historical transformations and the possible futures of national borders in a globalized society, the essays included in this collection tackle the issue from a broad range of political, intellectual, and disciplinary perspectives, all of which provide important contributions towards the goal of reimagining contemporary borders. Thus, Valsamis Mitsilegas adopts a human rights framework to argue for a paradigmatic shift towards a “rights-based system of border control” (pp. 15–31); Leonidas Cheliotis emphasizes the politico-economic dimension of national borders as engines for the reproduction of an exploitable global labor force (pp. 32–43); the late Barbara Hudson maps the difficult relations between law and ethics in the governance of global mobility, arguing for a post-Kantian cosmopolitan ethics as a countervailing force against the militarization of national borders (pp. 116–132); George Vasilev demystifies the apparent contradiction between the preservation of “national culture” and the free movement of people in a global world (pp. 98–115); Galina Cornelisse analyzes the relationship between global justice and national borders, arguing that a future of relaxed border controls only becomes conceivable in a scenario in which the socioeconomic well-being of migrants has become a global priority for which individual nation-states can be held accountable (pp. 80–97); Tiziana Torresi privileges a politico-institutional framework centered around a revamped notion of citizenship, one flexible enough to accommodate the temporary nature of most migratory projects while affording special rights to short-term migrants (pp. 64–79)—a framework echoed in Ray Michalowski's chapter on the US-Mexico border and the prospect of regional passports for migrant workers inhabiting these borderlands (pp. 44–63); finally, Vanessa Barker adopts an activist perspective to shed light on contemporary experiences of trans-border civil disobedience and solidarity campaigns that embody the project of “globalization from below” (pp. 133–152).
Despite significant differences in their approaches, all the contributors to this volume seem to agree with the notion that contemporary borders do not operate simply as walls aimed at blocking the free movement of people and excluding unwanted migrants from national territories, but rather as filters that contribute to the subordinate inclusion of marginalized migrants within the dominant economies of the world. In this respect, not unlike other repressive institutions (such as prisons and jails) whose very failure appears to justify their continued existence, the apparent ineffectiveness of global borders is indeed what ensures their productivity: they reproduce the enclosure and forced immobilization of a transnational labor force fractured along lines of nationality, ethnicity, and race. In other words, rather than keeping migrants out, borders permanently inscribe the bodies of those who cross them with the mark of un-deservingness and disposability, thus sanctioning their subordinate and exploitable status in the host society.
Although these structural dynamics are specifically addressed only by some of the essays included in Rethinking Border Control (specifically, the chapters by Ray Michalowski, Leonidas Cheliotis, and Nancy Wonders), taken together the contributions to this volume effectively illustrate how global borders function as powerful catalysts of the different forms of violence targeting migrants and refugees in contemporary societies. Thus, militarized borders embody the structural violence that is rooted in a “political-economic organization of society that imposes conditions of physical and emotional distress, from high morbidity and mortality rates to poverty and abusive working conditions” (Bourgois, 2001: 7). At the same time, the deadly spectacle of the border also provides a necessary frame of reference for the symbolic violence directed against migrants from the global South in the form of xenophobic, nativist, and racializing discourses—as attested by the growing ascendancy of right-wing populism across Europe and the United States. Finally, particularly as their power effects reverberate inside the territories they enclose, borders magnify the everyday violence experienced by migrants and refugees inside the host societies: the petty brutalities, the normalized abuses, the “small wars and invisible genocides”—to borrow from Nancy Schepher-Hughes (1996)—that plague the existence of the undeserving poor in late-capitalist societies.
In turn, these multiple layers of violence contribute to the material and discursive reproduction of migrants, especially if undocumented, as an ontologically subordinated and disposable fraction of the population—one which national borders have already marked as guilty of illegal trespassing and as deserving of detention and deportation. These dynamics create significant power effects, both of an instrumental and a symbolic nature. Instrumentally, the subordination of unauthorized migrants contributes to their reproduction as a source of precarious labor—both directly as cheap workers, and indirectly as an industrial reserve army of labor. At a symbolic level, the othering of unauthorized migrants as unwanted invaders of the national territory, as undeserving beneficiaries of the nation's welfare, and as unworthy predators of the country's economic resources feeds into a public discourse that magnifies the “wages of citizenship” (to paraphrase W.E.B. DuBois) for natives, while effectively hindering any effort at building class-based transnational solidarities between the national and immigrant workforces.
The structural dynamics briefly sketched above—which elsewhere I have described as the staples of an emerging regime of “global less eligibility” (see De Giorgi, 2010)—suggest that any struggle against the current regime of restrictive immigration control, as embodied in particular by the deadly violence of borders, is ultimately an act of resistance against the new international division of labor: a struggle that must be rooted in transnational solidarity and projected towards the construction of a radically different paradigm of globalization. Contemporary experiences of migrant struggles around the world—from Syrian and Afghan refugees resisting deportation from Greece to the agricultural immigrant workers rebelling against subhuman living conditions in the fields of Southern Italy, and from the undocumented migrants forcing their way out of “the jungle” in Calais, France, to those rioting against human rights violations in immigration detention centers across Europe—suggest that the “preferred future” for contemporary global borders is one in which these non-places become central sites of resistance to the new international division of labor and the global misery it propagates.