Border Myths, Security Myths: Contemporary Power and Stateless Outlaws (Pre-Recorded)

• In Event: Contemplating the Openness and Closure of Citizenship and Borders I

Abstract

Today, the politics of immigration and all that it represents—race, economic worries, criminality, and national security concerns—is the most debated topic in the United States. In this paper, I will shift the focus from immigration as an umbrella concept, under which all other political and economic problems fall, to the meaning of U.S. borders, particularly the southern border. Influenced by the work of Simone Weil and Hannah Arendt, I will examine how this shift in emphasis brings attention to various myths about the border, including the idea that it is a passive, fixed, often-naturalized entity. Related to these myths is the binary of inside and outside that undergirds conventional ideas of the nation-state. However, as I explore, this inside-outside binary is inadequate to explain the meaning of U.S. borders today.
With the recent waves of thousands of unaccompanied children and young women fleeing abuse arriving from Central America, the policy reaction and public discourse about their appearance expose and challenge these border myths. This sort of challenge can be dated back to the passage of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act and more recently, 1996 anti-terror legislation, and the post-9/11 fortification of the border, which have led not to absolute changes but interesting variations on the older myths. One of the most significant myths today is that presenting oneself at the border—particularly when the individual is a minor—is illegal. This dynamic has roots in older processes of criminalization in immigration policy and enforcement and yet is also new, indicating a more profound breakdown of political inclusion and the refugee system in the post 9/11 era.
The myth of instantaneous illegality is interestingly created and perpetuated by all sides of the immigration debate, showing historical continuity in the bipartisan view of immigration as a problem. Today, the designation “illegal”—which is mostly legally inaccurate—indicates how there is a dialectical interaction between appearance at the border and detention such that illegality then becomes a fact. The timeline of the migration process is treated as if it were compressed or non-existent, giving the impression that migrants are inherently illegal and/or that their mere presence is criminal. Detention then becomes material proof that an individual was “illegal.” These understandings indicate a border with singular and homogeneous policy outcomes (and therefore, meaning) and yet presentation at the border itself and the consequent physical occupation in detention are instances of a highly paradoxical condition: denationalized instances of territorial sovereignty (that is, a power that is legally authorized and yet outside of constitutional law and norms). However, “illegality” is not a criminal term because, as Arendt reminds us, criminals have rights whereas stateless people do not. Instead, the use of the term illegality is an attempt to take a legally blurry area and create a technically impossible binary of good/legal and bad/illegal. It is a move to create order where there is, in fact, undecidability. The myth is generated beyond reason and “right.”
The first two myths have a dynamic interaction with a third: the solution to the “illegal” problem is to enclose, fortify, and militarize the border even more. This set of solutions is only logical if the other sets of assumptions are true in any empirical sense. These myths become mutually constitutive, creating “truths” where there had been more porous, greyer relations. The border then becomes a site of the production of legality and illegality with the ostensibly passive territory of this country lying somewhere beyond. However, the same border that is held to be natural, material, and legally absolute is also a locus of denationalization, transnational activity and renationalization. From the free trade zones on the southern border, to political dynamics of the wars on drugs and terror, to mass detention centers that suspend all rights, the border does not so much demarcate fixed geospatial places or political identities so much as to suspend them. By the same token, the border itself—as noted above—is (imagined as) embodied in individuals who simultaneously become immobile (enclosed, confined) by politico-economic arrangements but who are always threatened with blacklisting (in the guest-worker program), termination (in free trade zones and the guest-worker program), and deportation. Thus, the border cannot be held to absolutely confine or immobilize but rather to render unfree. The reality is paradoxical: those made stateless because of their appearance at or confinement in denationalized zones are legally non-existent and yet subjects of sovereign power. Thus, the foreigner and the law together seemingly produce the border as a determinant of legal existence, illegality and non-existence. Deconstructing these myths will foster pluralism.

Author

• Kathleen R. Arnold, DePaul University