Affecting migration: Public information campaigns and the intimate spatialities of border enforcement

Abstract

A broad body of research has examined the shifting spatialities of contemporary border enforcement efforts, drawing particular attention to how border enforcement efforts increasingly take place away from the territorial edges of border enforcing states. However, existing research largely focuses on border enforcement efforts that mobilize strategies of militarization, securitization, and criminalization. In response, this paper draws on work in the fields of emotional and feminist geopolitics, to broaden understandings of the sites, modalities, and spatialities of border governance. Drawing on in-depth interviews, archival research, and discourse analysis, this paper examines public information campaigns launched by US border enforcement agencies between 1990 and 2012. In doing so, I show how these campaigns aim to affect migrant decision-making and reduce unauthorized migration by circulating strategically crafted messages and images into the intimate spaces of everyday life where potential migrants and their loved ones live and socialize. Unlike the hard power strategies of militarized borders and migrant criminalization, public information campaigns work as soft-power tools of governance that target the emotional registers of viewers and both respond to and counter particular gender ideologies. As this analysis suggests, understanding the full complexity of contemporary border governance requires that we broaden the scope of analysis beyond the hard power strategies of militarization, securitization, and criminalization to examine the softer side of border governance, a project that the insights of feminist political geography are particularly well suited for.

Keywords

Feminist geopolitics emotional geopolitics border enforcement migration management

In June of 2014, the Customs and Border Protection Agency (CBP) launched the Dangers Awareness Campaign,

an aggressive Spanish language outreach effort and an urgent call to action to community groups, the media, parents and relatives in the US and Central America to save and protect the lives of migrant children attempting to cross the southwest border. (US CBP, 2014)

This campaign was in direct response to the arrival of over 52,000 unaccompanied minors arriving in the US during fiscal year 2014, three quarters of whom came from El Salvador, Guatemala, or Honduras (US CBP, 2017). Though US CBP (2014) framed the campaign objectives in humanitarian terms—e.g. to “save and protect” the lives of children by informing them of the dangers of unauthorized crossings—campaign materials, including 6500 public service announcements aired on radio and television, also highlighted the lack of legal avenues available to unaccompanied children once in the United States and called on parents to protect the lives of their children by discouraging unauthorized crossings (see Figure 1). CBP hoped that informing potential migrants and their families of the probability of deportation once in the US would stem the tide of unaccompanied children; information was mobilized in an attempt to affect migration decisions.

Figure 1.

Poster from the Dangers Awareness Campaign. The text reads: “I thought it would be easy for my child to get papers in the north…But that wasn’t true.”

A wide variety of countries of the global north (e.g. the United States, Australia, France, the Netherlands) and transnational organizations (e.g. UNHCR, IOM) mobilize public information campaigns (PICs) as part of wider border enforcement and migration management strategies. However, little academic research has explored these efforts or the role they play in relation to larger processes of border and migration governance (a notable exception is Watkins (2017)). In turn, I employ a feminist geopolitical approach to examine PICs developed and implemented as part of US border enforcement efforts since the early 1990s. Drawing on interviews, secondary source material including newspaper and media articles, and discourse and content analysis of campaign materials, I argue that these campaigns differ significantly from other enforcement strategies in their both their modality and spatiality. First, unlike the hard power geopolitical strategies of border militarization and migrant criminalization, PICs are a soft-power (Nye, 1990) strategy that aims to affect (i.e. make a difference in) migrant decision-making by strategically mobilizing emotion-laden messages that respond to and counter particular gender ideologies. Unlike the reinforced barriers (i.e. walls and fences), military style weapons, and unmanned drones that figure central to traditional border enforcement efforts, the geopolitical tools of PICs are strategically crafted images and narratives that aim to compel emotional and affective responses, responses powerful enough to influence decision-making among potential migrants and their loved ones. Second, the spatial networks and distribution strategies of PICs demonstrate the expansion of border enforcement efforts into the intimate spaces of everyday life in sending communities, spaces of transit, and receiving communities. While political geographers have shown how border enforcement extends beyond the literal edges of nation-states into both domestic and foreign locations, PICs represent a further spatial expansion of enforcement efforts as materials are strategically distributed so as to encode antimigration messages into the daily lives and intimate spaces where migrants live and socialize. In examining the modality and spatiality of PICs as a mechanism of border enforcement, I illustrate that understanding the full complexity of contemporary border governance requires that we broaden our scope of analysis beyond the hard power strategies of militarization, securitization, and criminalization to examine the softer side of border governance, a project that the insights of feminist political geography are particularly well suited for. Importantly, the analysis that follows does not examine the way in which the emotive and affective strategies mobilized by border enforcement agencies are taken up by migrants, that is outside the scope of this particular project. Instead, this work analyzes the intentions and spatialities of the campaigns as they are reported by those involved in creating them and as interpreted through their content and implementation.

In what follows, I first contextualize my analysis within two existing bodies of research: (1) examinations of the shifting spatialities of border enforcement and (2) feminist and emotional geopolitics. I then turn to my case study of public relations and information campaigns created by or for US border enforcement agencies between the early 1990s and 2012. I conclude with some thoughts on the importance of inquiry into PICs as a mechanism of border enforcement.

The shifting spatialities of border enforcement

Regulating transnational flows of goods, people, and capital has become an issue of greater and greater concern for states of the global north since the widespread adoption of neoliberal economic policies in the 1990s and the US-led War on Terror in the early 2000s (Andreas, 1999; Andreas and Snyder, 2000; Jones, 2012). In turn, political geographers and social scientists have focused considerable attention on examining the shifting spatialities of border enforcement efforts (Coleman, 2007; Coleman and Kocher, 2011; Mountz, 2010, 2011; Mountz and Hiemstra, 2012; Varsanyi, 2008), their impact on unauthorized migrants (Cornelius, 2001; Nevins, 2008; Slack et al., 2013, 2016), and the economic and cultural logics driving them (Bigo, 2002; Inda, 2007; Luibheid, 2002; Nevins, 2010; Williams, 2011). While the territorial edges of nation-states remain key sites of regulation and enforcement (Jones, 2012), border enforcement related activities increasingly take place at sites geographically distant from the territorial edges of nation-states. Recent research into the geography of border enforcement has drawn particular attention to the dual processes of internalization and externalization.

Internalization refers to political, legal, and practical processes through which border enforcement practices, responsibilities, and authority have been expanded from the territorial edges of nation-states and purview of federal agencies to interior locations and local/state governments (in the case of the United States) (Menjivar, 2014). For example, Mathew Coleman’s (2007, 2009) work illustrates how border enforcement responsibilities have been devolved to local and state-level law enforcement agents via 287(g) agreements that deputize nonfederal personnel to carry out immigration related activities (Coleman and Kocher, 2011). These agreements, alongside federal programs such as Secure Communities that formalize relationships between local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies to facilitate immigration enforcement, increase the likelihood that a routine infraction such as a traffic stop will result in deportation. In turn, millions of migrants are detained and removed from the interior of receiving countries annually. For example, between 2009 and 2016 over 5.2 million people were deported from the United States (Chishti et al., 2017).

Internal enforcement efforts are often based on the strategy of “attrition through enforcement” and have an implicit and explicit focus on transforming everyday life for migrants. The purpose of attrition through enforcement-based laws (such as Arizona’s SB 1070) is not to increase immigration apprehensions per se, but rather “to saturate everyday life for undocumented immigrants with anxiety and fear, to the extent that they voluntarily leave the state and the country” (Williams and Boyce, 2013: 909; see also Varsanyi, 2008). Referred to by policy makers as “self-deportation,” this strategy of enforcement devolves enforcement onto immigrants themselves as they are compelled to “choose” to return to their home countries. For this reason, Coleman and Stuesse (2014) refer to interior enforcement as a biopolitical strategy of border control that looms over the practices and spaces of social reproduction. Unlike (though necessarily linked to) geopolitical strategies that focus on territorial control, interior enforcement as a biopolitical strategy follows migrants as they move internally, within the nation-state. As Coutin (2010) argues, the proliferation and expansion of immigration enforcement practices and policies have created a context in which migrants are forced to inhabit subnational spaces—spaces that are divested of both constitutional (e.g. the right to an attorney at public expense) and everyday (e.g. the right to inhabit public space without fear) rights. However, this is not to suggest that the threat of immigration enforcement is ever-present everywhere to the same degree. Rather, Coleman and Stuesse’s adoption of a topological framework to characterize interior enforcement recognizes the way in which the intensity of practices vary and undulate over space, and also acknowledges that they are not fixed at particular geographic locations. However, this is not to suggest that interior bordering practices are less significant than those that take place at the territorial edges of nation-states; rather, it is to draw attention to how different modalities of enforcement, and their related spatialities, affect the lives of migrants and processes of migration differently.

In addition to the internalization of border enforcement efforts, the externalization of immigration policing and border enforcement activities is a more and more common practice aimed at preemptively stopping migratory flows. As Menjivar (2014) explains:

The externalization of borders involves a series of extraterritorial activities in countries or origin and transit at the request of the (more powerful) receiving states (e.g., the United States, the European Union, Australia) for the purpose of controlling the movement of potential migrants. (357)

From check-points in transit countries to off-shore policing and the location of detention centers in nonsovereign territory, border enforcement takes place beyond the national borders they are intended to protect. The externalization of enforcement most often relies upon formal and informal collaborations between governmental agencies. For example, bi-lateral and multi-lateral border enforcement collaborations result in foreign governments and agents being increasingly involved in assisting in border enforcement efforts (Bialasiewicz, 2012; Menjivar, 2014). Within this context, the more powerful receiving country often exerts pressure on countries of transit in order to garner cooperation in regulating migration. For example, Mexico has received more than $100 million from the US State Department’s Merida Initiative for enforcement efforts along Mexico’s southern border (Seelke and Finklea, 2017). The US committed an additional $86 million in funding to support Programa Frontera Sur, an effort to curb Central American migration into Mexico announced in 2014.

Work by Watkins (2017) illustrates how information campaigns work as an additional form of externalized border enforcement. His analysis of PICs developed by the Australian government shows how campaigns target the spatial imaginaries of potential migrants. In particular, he argues that Australian campaigns work to frame “home” as safe and financially stable, while unauthorized migration to Australia is dangerous, financially irresponsible, and destined to fail. While Watkins’s analysis sheds important light on how PICs extend the spatial reach of border enforcing states in important ways, his analysis stops short of providing specific information on the particular spatial strategies used within migrant sending countries, while also leaving the gendering of campaign materials unexamined.

While foreign spaces—namely countries of origin and transit (Collyer, 2007; Collyer and Haas, 2012)—are targeted by border enforcing states, the political and physical geography of islands in particular has been used as a strategic geopolitical tool in struggles over migration (Loyd and Mountz, 2014; Mountz, 2011; Mountz and Loyd, 2014). For example, the detention of immigrants on remote islands inhibits them from being physically present in sovereign territory—a requirement for lodging an asylum claim. At the same time, the geographic remoteness of many island nations, as well as maritime detention spaces such as military vessels, limits migrant access to legal advocates and resources, negatively affecting their ability to negotiate the complex and convoluted legal systems of receiving countries. However, as Mountz and Loyd (2014) argue, onshore and off-shore enforcement efforts are intimately connected and must be understood in relation to each other. Border enforcement infrastructure, such as detention centers and state agents, moves and spreads across national borders, transcending any clear distinction between the domestic and the foreign.

Importantly, the spatial expansion of border enforcement efforts rests on the discursive construction of unauthorized migrants (and, in some cases, immigrants more broadly) as a security threat (Bigo, 2002; Huysmans, 2006). Discourses of chaos and crisis that render unauthorized migration a direct threat to the nation-state are used to justify the expansion of sovereign power to sovereign and nonsovereign spaces (Mountz and Heimstra, 2014; see also Bigo, 2002). Harsher and harsher enforcement efforts are, in turn, justified in the name of protecting the nation and the citizenry despite the ways in which these efforts create a whole range of insecurities and vulnerabilities for citizens and noncitizens alike (Chacon, 2006; Cowen and Gilbert, 2008; Hyndamn, 2008).

While inquiry into the shifting geographies and spatialities of border enforcement has importantly illustrated how these efforts move both internally within national territory, as well as extending beyond national borders into nonsovereign and foreign spaces, existing research remains largely focused on enforcement strategies that mobilize process of securitization, militarization, and criminalization. Research has illustrated how military strategies and techniques are integrated into the operational frameworks of border enforcing state agencies as they police national borders at and beyond the territorial edges of nation-states (Jones and Johnson, 2016; Nevins, 2010). At the same time, examinations of ‘crimmigration’ (Stumpf, 2006) show how criminal and immigration law are increasingly converging. Within this context unauthorized migration is associated with increasingly harsh criminal consequences, resulting in the widespread expansion of criminal prosecutions and immigrant detention (Burridge, 2011; Chacon, 2006; Martin, 2012). While militarization and criminalization remain, in many ways, the cornerstones of immigration and border enforcement in countries of the global North, they are not the sole strategies being mobilized. Rather, PICs complicate the landscape of contemporary border enforcement as they aim to affect migrant decision-making through the strategic circulation of targeted messages. As discussed below, the hard power strategies of military equipment, surveillance, and criminal prosecution are supplemented by the soft power of messages circulated in images, videos, and songs transmitted into the banal spaces of everyday life. In the next section, I discuss the way in which work in the fields of feminist and emotional geopolitics has expanded the scale and sites of geopolitical analysis in ways that are particularly relevant for examining and understanding the soft power of PICs as a mechanism of border enforcement.

Feminist and emotional geopolitics

Since the early 2000s, feminist geographers have rescaled geopolitical analysis to look at the unexpected (or unexamined) spaces, sites, and subjects through which international relations play out (Dowler and Sharp, 2001; Hyndman, 2001; Massaro and Williams, 2013; Pratt and Rosner, 2006; Smith and Staeheli, 2014). In doing so, feminist scholars have illustrated how understanding geopolitical processes such as territorialization requires paying attention to how these processes relate to, rely upon, and play out in the intimate spaces of everyday life and continually produce and challenge different forms of subjectivity.

The feminist expansion of geopolitical inquiry allows us to see how intimate relationships and negotiations are also struggles over geopolitical power and meaning (Smith and Staeheli, 2014). By destabilizing the global geopolitical scale we can develop more nuanced understandings of how the intimate spaces and relations of everyday life are incorporated into geopolitical strategies of territorial control. For example, Sara Smith’s (2011, 2012) examination of the Leh District in India illustrates how geopolitical struggles over territory are waged on and through the bodies and intimate lives of individuals, families, and communities. As she shows, love, sex, and desire are deeply geopolitical and their regulation is central to the creation and maintenance of territorial boundaries. While a feminist curiosity (Enloe, 2004) exposes seemingly personal relations and issues as deeply geopolitical, feminist challenges to the traditional scale of geopolitical analysis are crucial for illuminating how geopolitical processes play out in uneven and inequitable ways. For example, a shift from “national security” to “human security” makes clear the very ways in which border enforcement and other state policies that claim to foster greater security actually create a range of insecurities and vulnerabilities for particular groups of people, compelling us to ask the question “security for whom?” (Hyndman, 2008). Examinations of border enforcement efforts in particular have illustrated that despite claims that they are necessary for fostering greater security, they lead to increased rates of physical and sexual violence among women and people of color (Falcon, 2007; Nevins, 2008; Rubio-Goldsmith et al., 2006; Slack et al., 2013).

More recently, feminist calls for attention to the emotive dimensions of geopolitical processes have drawn attention to the way in which state actors use emotions as an instrument of governance (Cowen and Gilbert, 2008) and how emotional messages are taken up by differently situated populations in particular places in ways that both are and are not intended by those who govern (Pain, 2009). As Cowen and Gilbert (2008) write: “fear and insecurity are powerful emotions through which the state has sought to govern domestically and internationally, thus linking political geographies of fear at the national and global scale” (49). We must, therefore, take emotions seriously as instruments of governance, not just individualized feelings or experiences. For example, within the post-September 11, 2001 context, feminist and other critical scholars have illustrated the way in which governments capitalize on fear as a way to increase citizen compliance for greater surveillance measures, punitive justice, and restrictions on workplace rights (e.g. Ahmed, 2004; Pain and Smith, 2008). The mobilization of fear often hinges upon the circulate of discourses that are specifically gendered and racialized, drawing on neocolonial narratives of (white) female and child vulnerability and nonwhite male threat (Abu-Lughod, 2002; Lind and Williams, 2011)—particular bodies are mobilized for their emotional and affective potentiality for “specific bodies [carry representational] burdens of meaning, expectation and ability” (Sharp, 2009; Tolia Kelly, 2006).

Inquiry into the emotional dimensions of contemporary border and immigration enforcement policies in particular has focused on how these policies are embedded in and emerge from emotional discourses of fear and (in)security (Huysmans, 2006; Hyndman, 2007; Williams and Boyce, 2013). Fears of “the other”—be it nonwhite men framed as potential terrorists or nonwhite women framed as hyper-sexual and therefore a threat to the economic and moral health of the nation—abound in public and political discourses justifying greater and greater border security measures framed as necessary to protect the health and well-being of “rightful” and “deserving” citizens (Bigo, 2002; Inda, 2007; Luibheid, 2002). However, little evidence indicates that border securitization efforts actually make US residents or citizens safer. Rather, studies show border militarization increases fear and anxiety among both migrants and borderland residents alike (Williams and Boyce, 2013), and undermines the work of local law enforcement (Theodore, 2013). Simultaneously, fear and security-based discourses affect the everyday experiences of migrants in other ways. As Noble and Poynting (2008) discuss in the Australian context, discourses of a “culture of fear” directed at Arab and Muslim migrants affect migrant belonging and shape their ability to feel “at home” (129). The regulation of belonging is an emotional and affective process whereby the embodied experiences of people are shaped as they interact in the world in relation to geopolitical discourses. As they write, “Belonging, and not belonging, are, of course not simply cognitive processes of identification, but are highly charged, affective relations of attachment to and exclusion from particular places” (130). Everyday experiences of racism and vilification compel embodied experiences of fear, sadness, and resignation which limit migrants’ ability to feel like they belong; affective energies circulate between natural-born citizens and migrants, excluding them from particular places and limiting their attachment to their new country of residence.

The work of feminist political geographers therefore compels us to attend to the way in which geopolitical processes reverberate through the spaces of everyday life and how emotions are mobilized as instruments of governance in ways that rely upon and produce different forms of subjectivity. In the next section, I draw on these insights to examine the development and implementation of PICs as instruments of border governance by US border enforcement agencies. In doing so, I illustrate how the modality and spatiality of PICs as a mechanism of border enforcement differs from the hard power strategies of militarization and securitization.

Affecting migration in the intimate spaces of everyday life

While restrictive US border and immigration policies began emerging in the late 1800s, it was not until the 1990s that border security became a central focus of US federal policies (Nevins, 2010). In the early 1990s, a series of border enforcement operations were launched that aimed to funnel unauthorized migration routes away from urban areas in California and Texas and into the harsh landscape of southern Arizona. As migrants were pushed into more difficult and rugged terrain, agents in the Tucson Sector (located between Ajo, Arizona and the border of New Mexico) began recording greater and greater numbers of migrant deaths or near death incidents. Believing that “more needed to be done,” a small group of agents in the Tucson Sector came together and designed what they referred to as a “blunt and factual” PIC aimed at educating “potential entrants before they found themselves in trouble” (Interviewee 11, 2011, personal communication). Called Stay Out, Stay Alive, this was the first PIC developed in conjunction with contemporary US border enforcement efforts. Campaign materials—consisting of printed fliers and short public service announcements aired on television—aimed to influence migrant decision among male migrants (who made up over 87% of apprehended migrants during this time period (Leuter, 2018)) by combining factual information with graphic images aimed at compelling an emotional response among viewers. Print and television announcements depicted Hispanic men lying dead in the desert and graphic images of bloated and decomposing male bodies (Hernandez, 1994). The fallibility of the male body was made visceral through images of death and bodily decay, while statistics on the physical impossibility of being able to carry enough water to maintain adequate hydration during migration attempts targeted the potential migrant, implicitly assumed to be a rational male decision-maker. In doing so, campaign materials targeted the rational and emotional registers of their audience simultaneously.

Carter and McCormack (2006) argue that exploring the emotive and affective dimensions of geopolitical strategies is crucial “to any understanding of the operation and proliferation of different modalities of power and politics in the contemporary world” (230) for politics operates not only through formal state policies and practices but also through the mobilization of affective energies (see also O’Tuathail, 2003). For example, Anderson’s (2010) examination of the US-led War on Terror illustrates how collective affects become the objects of various modes of power within the context of militarized war-making. He uses the example of “shock and awe” military campaigns to illustrate the affective dimensions of military strategies. Characterized by dramatic aerial campaigns, shock and awe aimed to create feelings of hopelessness and impotence among foreign troops, serving to challenge their will to fight. Similarly, early PICs aimed to compel feelings of inevitable failure, fear and bodily suffering. Images were developed with the explicit intent of being jarring so as to disrupt feelings of masculine confidence and invincibility and undermine the confidence necessary to attempt an unauthorized crossing (Interviewee 11, 2011, personal communication). In order to be effective, the campaigns worked preemptively, targeting spaces on the Mexican side of the border where migrants congregated before attempted crossings. US Border Patrol agents distributed thousands of fliers at bars, restaurants, and cheap hotels in the border towns of Nogales, Agua Prieta, and Sasabe in the early years of the campaign. But by 1994, Stay Out, Stay Alive had been adopted as an agency-wide initiative and relationships with the Mexican and Guatemalan consulates were used to facilitate the distribution of television announcements into the interior of Mexico and into Central America.

Border enforcement efforts throughout the 1990s did not prove to be effective in reducing unauthorized migration rates. By the year 2000, the Border Patrol documented a record 1.6 million apprehensions along the southwestern border of the US and the number of migrant deaths increased exponentially as border militarization pushed migrants into more difficult and rugged terrain (Rubio-Goldsmith et al., 2006). In an attempt to gain operational control of the border, militarization and securitization were the focus of enforcement efforts and by the turn of the 21st century, Stay Out, Stay Alive and PICs campaigns more broadly were abandoned by state border enforcement agencies.

However, in 2004, PICs re-emerged as tools of border governance in response to public and political pressure surrounding the skyrocketing number of migrant deaths along the border. In May of 2003, the bodies of 19 undocumented migrants were found in the back of a refrigerated tractor-trailer along US Highway 77 outside Victoria, Texas. This was the deadliest human smuggling tragedy to date on US soil and served to garner substantive public and political attention. In the aftermath of this incident, a series of Congressional Hearings were held and a number of national and bi-national initiatives aimed at reducing migrant deaths were developed. It was in this context that the US Customs and Border Protection Agency and Department of Homeland Security contracted Latino public relations firm Elevación/Elevation to produce a multi-year, multi-million dollar campaign aimed at affecting migrant decision-making and reducing unauthorized migration attempts. This non-CBP branded (i.e. anonymous) campaign entitled No Más Cruces en la Frontera, focused “on educating the potential migrant and migrant sponsor of the risks and dangers” of undocumented crossings in order to affect migration-related decisions and reduce unauthorized migration attempts (Department of Homeland Security Appropriations for 2010, 2010).

Unlike the relatively small scale, and low-budget Stay Out, Stay Alive campaign, No Más Cruces was a large-scale and large-budget initiative that aimed to understand, respond to, and counter the cultural and ideological drivers of unauthorized migration. Central to the development of campaign materials was in-depth research in migrant sending communities and with the families of migrants who had perished during unauthorized migration attempts (personal communication). Carried out in stages between 2004 and 2012, this research aimed to identify the cultural discourses and beliefs that were the most powerful drivers of unauthorized migration attempts in order to inform the development of campaign materials capable of affecting migrant decision-making. Rather than focusing on abstract facts and statistics such as migrant mortality or kidnapping rates, campaign developers worked to create a “campaign filled with the honest emotions of the human plight” (personal communication). Emotions were the targets, their manipulation the mechanism by which government agencies and campaign producers aimed to affect migration. Migracorridos (migration ballads), short television spots, and print campaigns aimed to “show facts as deeply personal events rather than meaningless statistics; capitalizing on the immigrants’ own experiences in an effort to shift their perspectives” (Interviewee 36, 2012, personal communication). In order to do so, campaign materials responded to and attempted to counter gendered cultural ideologies of machismo, migration as key to familial economic stability, and the necessity of family reunification, while appealing to notions of the maternal responsibility to protect and familial obligation.

Discourses of male migration as necessary to provide economically for one’s family were countered with narratives of the emotional and material burdens faced by family members when a loved one goes missing or dies during a migration attempt. For example, the migracorrido No Hay Hombres describes the emotional and economic impact male migration can have on rural communities and families:

In this town there are no men

All of them left for the North

They left their house and land

And in their path they left orphans, widows, and debts

When the little girls wake up

“The good morning” they say to me with an “And Daddy hasn’t returned yet?”

“He’ll return soon,” I lie to them

And I repeat it wanting to believe it.

Crowns of white lilies, bells of sorrow

The smell of death fills the town.

Ghosts of yesteryear knock on my door, coming for my son

Like for his father and his grandfather.

“Don’t go, my son, don’t wrap yourself in a shroud,

don’t make me dress in black.”

In this town there are no men

All of them left for the North

They left their house and land

And in their path they left orphans, widows, and debts

In this town there are no men

All of them left for the North

Now their mothers and widows beg

Heaven that there be no more

Crosses on the border.

The ballad’s focus on “orphans, widows, and debts” works to counter the assumption that unauthorized migration will lead to greater economic security for the families of men who migrate. Instead, the target audience of young men are told that migration attempts gone awry lead to mothers and wives being left in a position of greater precarity and economic vulnerability (e.g. now their mothers and widows beg).

While the potentiality of economic security obtained via migration is undermined, campaign materials also link masculinity with staying in one’s home country as campaign creators attempt to respond to and push back against cultural ideologies that frame migration as a rite of passage for young men. For example, in one migracorrido, a young man is depicted stumbling through the desert during a migration attempt and reflects on the possibility of returning to Mexico: “Since I was a kid, I was told a man never gives up. Now that I’m on the other side [in the US], I realize they were wrong” (Marosi, 2005). And in another, the singer comments “chickening out is also a manly thing to do” (LeBron, 2009), a message also seen in posters distributed as part of the campaign that further warn that graveyards are full of the brave and the macho (Figure 2).

Figure 2.

Poster from the No Más Cruces en la Frontera campaign. The text reads: Backing out is a manly thing. Before you cross to the other side remember: the cemeteries are full of the brave and the macho.

The willingness not to migrate or to turn back are framed as signs of “true” masculinity as “stereotypical notions of machismo are simultaneously admonished and appealed to” in an attempt to affect the migration decisions of young men (LeBron, 2009).

Campaign materials also worked to counter family reunification as a driving force of unauthorized migration by highlighting female and child vulnerability during migration attempts. For example, the migracorrido Esperanza Perdida follows:

Maybe they were from Uriangato

Maybe they came from Morelia.

Esperanza was six years old

Her mother was Carmela

They were going to look for a father

On the other side of the border

They crossed the river at night

They followed it toward the desert,

They say a damn coyote

Took advantae of Carmela first,

He killed Esperanza with one blow

And left them under the clear sky.

When Carmela woke up

Her body was sore

And there left in the sand

Lie Esperanza

It looked like she was just sleeping

As if nothing happened.

The discursive framing of family reunification alongside sexual violence and the murder of a child in front of her mother aims to affect decision-making among mothers traveling with children. As Cornelius (2001) and others have documented, US–Mexico border militarization has made circular migration increasingly difficult resulting in more long-term settlement in the US and chain migration as women and children migrate to reunite with fathers. In turn, US border enforcement agencies and campaign developers shifted messaging to also appeal to young women and mothers. The messaging of this migracorrido in particular aims to compel mothers to consider if their safety and the lives of their children are worth potentially reuniting with a husband and father.

The simple and brief messages of migracorridos, television spots, and print advertisements were further elaborated on in mini-documentaries featuring the personal stories of families whose loved ones had perished during migration attempts. Through targeted visits to towns and villages with high emigration rates, campaign producers identified families whose personal experiences fit best within the larger messaging strategy and storyline of the campaign (Interviewee 37, 2012, personal communication). In 2 minute long videos, family members—in particular mothers and wives—discuss the motivations that compelled their loved one to attempt migration and the toll (emotion, financial, and otherwise) that their death has had on the family. The longer format pieces were strategically developed in order to increase the affective capacity of the campaign, a capacity that creators believed could only be realized by acknowledging the complex factors that compel migration attempts and the reverberating effects of migrant deaths. As the Executive Vice-President of Elevación/Elevation explained:

Having a series with longer format pieces was not only a creative recommendation but a strategic decision. The death of any person at the border is not the end; but rather it prompts an outpouring of recrimination, regrets and memories from those left behind. We simply couldn’t communicate that complexity in a 30-second spot. (Elevación Launches No Más Cruces en la Frontera, 2011)

The longer format pieces, filled with emotion-laden images of mourning mothers and wives and stories of lives lost too soon and the unintended consequences of failed migration attempts, were seen as necessary in order to counter the cultural and economic factors that compel migration attempts. In the eyes of campaign producers, the affective capacity of PICs rested on their ability to recognize and respond to this complexity.

Moreover, particular bodies take center stage in PICs because of their emotive and affective capacity in relation to campaign objectives for, as Tolia-Kelly (2006) writes the “affective capacities of any body are signified unequally within social spaces of being and feeling” (3). The tear streaked faces of grieving mothers, wives, and children are mobilized in mini-documentaries alongside photographs of the family member who lost their life as campaign creators attempt to push back against the factors that lead individuals to migrate. Viewers are compelled to question if the potential benefits of migration are worth the possible emotional and financial toll a failed attempt could inflict on family members left behind.

While the messaging and format of PICs is crucial to their affective intent and potentiality, so too is the spatiality of their distribution. As previously discussed, the materials created for the Stay Out, Stay Alive campaign were largely circulated in the border region in places where migrants congregated and prepared for unauthorized crossings. However, the distribution strategy of No Más Cruces was much more expansive, mobilizing numerous distribution mechanisms and networks and targeting three particular types of locations: sending communities, spaces of transit, and receiving communities in the US.

First, materials distributed in sending communities were intended to plant “a seed of doubt in the potential immigrant’s mind and thereby dissuade a percentage of immigrants from attempting illegal crossings” (Department of Homeland Security Appropriations for 2010, 2010). Second, materials circulated in places of transit—bus and train stations and migrant shelters—focused on “educating those in the middle of the journey” and encouraging them to turn back (Department of Homeland Security Appropriations for 2010, 2010). And finally, materials that targeted family members and others in the US focused on discouraging them from arranging for and paying for crossings, conveying “the message that responsibilities do lie on them if something happens and blood is on their hands” (Department of Homeland Security Appropriations for 2010, 2010). Unlike internal policing and attrition through enforcement policies, the materials circulated as part of No Más Cruces were not intended to compel those already in the US to self-deport. Instead, the goal was to compel preemptive feelings guilt associated with migration attempts gone awry, feelings strong enough to compel potential sponsors to refuse to finance migration attempts. In focusing on receiving communities in Texas, Arizona, and California, as well as sending communities and places of transit, No Más Cruces functioned as both an externalized and internalized mechanism of border enforcement.

Beginning in 2011, campaign producers spearheaded a new approach to campaign distribution that extended beyond the mass media distribution networks used previously. Instead, attention was focused on building relationships with nonprofits, schools, churches, and Mexican governmental entities in order to more effectively circulate campaign materials and insert them into the everyday lives and spaces of potential migrants. Elevación/Elevation and CBP explicitly aimed to solidify the messages of the No Más Cruces campaign at the “grassroots level and ‘encode’ [its messages] in the popular lexicon of [the] target audience” (Interviewee 36, 2012, personal communication). For example, a relationship was developed with Latin American Institute for Educational Communication (ILCE) to transmit the No Más Cruces migracorridos through their radio channel and webstreaming service that broadcasts to more than 30,000 schools and teacher training facilities in Mexico. ILCE representatives further agreed to include migration as part of the educational curriculum covered in their educational website, RED ESCOLAR, used by over 14,000 schools in Mexico. The goal of this partnership was to integrate No Más Cruces campaign materials into prompts for classroom discussions in order to address the “invisible aspects of migration” among children in grades 1 through 9 (Interviewee 36, 2012, personal communication).

Importantly, strategic decisions were made by campaign producers and US border enforcement agencies to intentionally de-link campaign materials from US geopolitical goals—the affective intention of the campaign was framed as humanitarian rather than geopolitical. As Pablo Izquierdo of Elevación/Elevation stated, “When we approached the Mexican media, we approach[ed] it as a humanitarian campaign…We didn’t tell them [that the US Border Patrol] was behind it because consumer research indicated that it wasn’t going to be as well-received” (Surdin, 2009). The de-linking of campaign materials from the border enforcing agencies responsible for them aimed to invisibilize the geopolitical aims of the campaign materials (e.g. influencing migrant decision-making and reducing unauthorized migration attempts), instead allowing listeners to focus on the “heartfelt” and personalized stories they conveyed. In this way, the affective potential of PICs was dependent upon invisibilizing their geopolitical intent as a soft-power tool of US border enforcement agencies.

Affecting migration: The softer side of border enforcement

While spectacular border enforcement strategies such as high-tech barriers and large-scale workplace raids garner much public and political attention, PICs represent a softer side of border enforcement as campaign messages circulate through the banal spaces of everyday life and are intentionally de-linked from official border enforcement agencies and objectives. The intimate spaces of homes, schools, churches, and bars become sites of US geopolitical intervention as campaign messages of the potential (though most often framed as inevitable) terrors and bodily decay associated with unauthorized migration are broadcast in auditory and visual registers. Far from innocent or benign, these campaigns mobilize fear, anxiety, and potential guilt to further US border enforcement objectives that are founded in and perpetuate transnational inequalities. Tales of rape, kidnapping, and death aim to incite fear, while mourning family members are depicted in an attempt to compel feelings of familial guilt and responsibility. Campaign creators struggle to reach the hearts and minds of potential migrants by both mobilizing and countering gendered discourses of responsibility and vulnerability. In this context, the hard power tools of fences, night vision goggles, drones, and automatic weapons are complemented by the soft-power tool of strategic messages circulated in the intimate spaces of everyday life; militarization and criminalization are supplemented by affective and emotional persuasion. As feminist scholars have long argued, understanding geopolitical processes requires that we attend to unexpected sites and subjects. As this analysis illustrates, understanding contemporary efforts to regulate transnational mobility requires expanding the geographic scope of inquiry to attend to the tools of highly charged information campaigns as they circulate through the intimate spaces of everyday life.

PICs are not unique to the US context. Rather, they are integrated into the border enforcement strategies of a wide range of countries of the global North. Since 2000, the Belgium government and related agencies have organized migration prevention campaigns using television advertisements and theatre plays in Albania, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Guinea, India, and Tunisia (European Commission, 2016). In 2008/9 the Czech Republic launched a media campaign targeted at Mongolian migrants that highlighted the realities of the labor market and living costs in the Czech Republic. Italian campaigns in Egypt and Morocco have targeted unaccompanied minors and employed comic books and cartoons to disseminate information about the dangers of unauthorized migration (Schans and Optekamp, 2016). Better understanding the modalities and spatialities of PICs as a mechanism of border enforcement is crucial for understanding the full complexity of efforts to regulate transnational mobility. Many questions can (and should) be asked about the spatiality of these strategies, the messages they transmit, how they are developed and distributed, and the way they are taken up and interpreted by potential migrants.

As Mountz (2011) discusses, geopolitical processes are far from coherent or fixed. Feminist inquiry into the unexpected sites and processes through which geopolitical relations are continually (re)made complicates how we understand the workings of state power and their uneven effects. Attending only to the hard tools of militarization and criminalization paints only a partial picture of how border enforcement plays out in the daily lives of (potential) migrants. Much can be learned by attending to how states mobilize affective and emotive strategies in an attempt to hinder transnational mobility by affecting the choices migrants and their loved ones make. Feminist political geographers have importantly expanded how we understand the political and, in turn, the subjects and objects of (geo)political analysis. Recent inquiry into emotional geopolitics provides further insight into how we understand the workings of power, how it moves and transforms across scale and space, and the political implications of what we research and how we talk about it. Further inquiry into PICs can not only help us understand the varied tools, strategies, and spatialities of governance, but also how these efforts animate the intimate spaces of everyday life as they circulate across borders and boundaries of all kinds.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

This article benefited from helpful suggestions from Jacob Miller, Geoff Boyce, Caroline Faria, Vanessa Massaro, and two anonymous reviewers.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (Grant/Award Number: 1103230), Clark University Pruser Dissertation Enhancement Award, and the Agnese Nelms Haury Program in Environment and Social Justice Faculty Fellowship (2017-19).

Jill M Williams is an associate research social scientist in the Southwest Institute for Research on Women and Lecturer in the School of Geography and Development at the University of Arizona.

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