Seeing Like an (undocumented) Immigrant Understanding Borders and Migration from the Migrant Perspective

• In Event: Mobility Regimes in the World-System

Abstract

The “immigration problem” appears as such only from the standpoint of the capitalist state, a perspective that has become common sense in both scholarship and public discourse. This article challenges that framing by developing an immigrant’s theory of borders and asking: what, to an undocumented migrant, is a border? I argue that borders are not simply territorial lines or exceptional sites of exclusion. They are social relations that stratify populations and distribute protection and exposure through the production of legal status. Using Marxist theory and a historical materialist approach, I trace contemporary bordering back to the enclosures of the commons, treating primitive accumulation as an early and formative project of mobility control. The enclosure of the commons and the role that regulating the mobility of the dispossessed played at the onset of capitalism is instructive for understanding the migration and its regulation throughout capitalist history. Seeing this from this vantage point enables challenging the way migration and the transgressing of borders is presented from the capitalist perspective. It we look at the issue from the other side–from the migrant perspective as it were, migration and borders look vastly different. From the migrant’s standpoint, there is no “migrant crisis” nor “immigration problem”, but rather a border problem, and ultimately a capitalist problem, for which the existence and policing of borders is essential.

Author

• Salvador Rangel, Swarthmore College