Posts Tagged ‘border’

‘Illegal Immigration Does Not Happen in a Vacuum’ – New York Times

// April 27th, 2009 // 5 Comments » // Immigration

Article here

Anti-immigration strategists call for tough enforcement policies, which have only exacerbated the phenomena of mixed-status families as undocumented immigrants stay in this country and raise children here rather than risk leaving and facing a 10-year ban. If not for this ban, I would not be living in the shadows of American society today.

Illegal immigration does not take place in a vacuum — it is inextricably tied to the search for cheap labor, the mirage of an American dream, and enforcement efforts combined with an outdated system of antiquated quotas and categories. The barriers to solutions will only multiply when we ignore these inconvenient truths.

I took the opportunity to rail against the 10-year ban rather than talk for the DREAM Act–I think Hiroshi covered that angle quite well.

I fail to fathom why my family came here, hence I cannot really provide a personal narrative that seems appealing. Maybe it was a combination of losing faith in the Fijian government, my Dad losing his job, my mom yearning for her family and my sister–who was already studying in the United States–wanting her family with her. No one thought about me. No one thinks about me. I am just supposed to go to school, earn as many degrees as I can and stay out of trouble (and this is when I can afford school). That is my ‘job.’ It may be a mess created by my parents choices like Mark Krikorian states, but are they really to be blamed for being attracted to the false idea of the American dream? Armed with very little intellectual capital, they tried their best to do things legally. They had no idea that the 10-year visa backlog would age me out. How could they? Even the average American is clueless about immigration laws, let alone the little nuances in them.

Tamar Jacoby certainly does a good job of fleshing out what we have here, regardless of the socially constructed categories of legal and illegal:

But the article is also a tale of incredible stupidity on the part of the United States. A father realizes he has an unusually gifted daughter and sacrifices everything to bring her to America. She grasps early on that she’s a star and defies the rules to prove it. The family stays together against all odds so she can realize her potential. What a boon for the U.S. — or so you’d think. But then we thumb our nose at all this striving and sacrifice, blocking the young woman cold and throwing away what she could contribute over her lifetime.

Imagine how this story would look in historical perspective. What if classical Rome had behaved as we’re behaving? “Talented people from all over the known world were attracted to the great civilization and traveled there, hoping to share their gifts. But the rulers declined their services, barring them from even minimal participation, trashing their innovations and turning away their talents.”

You’d say that great power deserved to fail — and you’d be right. What a colossal waste.

A waste indeed.

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U.S. Border Wall and Detention Policy Listed as International Human Rights Concerns

// November 2nd, 2008 // No Comments » // Human Rights, Immigration

Courtesy: The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) of the Organization of American States (OAS)



Border Wall in Texas, United States

Audio Video in original language Video in Spanish Video in English Photos


Due process problems in the application of policies on immigrant detention and deportation in the United States

Audio Video Photos

More Border Woes – DHS runs out of $$; Head replaced

// September 25th, 2008 // 3 Comments » // Immigration

Trouble seems to follow the border fence everywhere–they may be hedged together. After waiving environmental protections, trying to build the wall through a school campus, and causing flooding trouble, we hear from the DHS that the proposed border wall is over-budget and that the official in charge of the multibillion-dollar program, Greg Giddens, has been removed.

Sep. 22–The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has run out of money to build remaining segments of the U.S.-Mexico border fence in the Rio Grande Valley and elsewhere, and the project already is $400 million over budget.

Unexpected construction costs and legal holdups have paralyzed construction just weeks after DHS broke ground in the Valley.

A Sept. 10 Government Accountability Office report said the average cost of fencing has increased more than 40 percent this year.

Seems like it is bailout season all-round. Just say no! Congress is now bailing out DHS as well from going overbudget. How much? Not some thousands, not some millions, no, just about $4 billion. NB: How many children can that kind of money feed?

I cannot fathom how the most powerful country in the world goes over-budget and spends more than it has allocated for projects like building a border wall. Costs of materials increased? Please, when you are asking Congress for funding, don’t you account for inflation and annual cost increases? Or does the DHS have poor economists on staff, (much like poor IJs)?

Maybe they had hoped to get some ‘illegals’ to build the border wall and cut costs in that manner. At any time, the government is the largest employer of undocumented immigrants alas, the increased scrutiny probably dampened those plans.

Regardless, this is what the GAO said:

According to program officials, as of August 2008, fencing costs averaged $7.5 million per mile for pedestrian fencing and $2.8 million per mile for vehicle fencing, up from estimates in February 2008 of $4 million and $2 million per mile, respectively. Furthermore, the life-cycle cost is not yet known, in part because of increasing construction costs and because the program office has yet to determine maintenance costs and locations for fencing projects beyond December 2008. In addition, land acquisition issues present a challenge to completing fence construction.

Wait, you are telling me THESE fences are worth millions of dollars and supposed to ‘keep out’ illegal immigrants? I used to climb higher walls at age 7 !!

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Border No Boundary for Some Students

// September 21st, 2008 // No Comments » // Education, Immigration

Students from a school in the Roma Independent School District cross the Miquel Aleman Bridge from Mexico into the United States.

Students from a school in the Roma Independent School District cross the Miquel Aleman Bridge from Mexico into the United States.

The Monitor photos by Gabe Hernandez A student walks across the Miguel Aleman Bridge from Mexico to the United States with her guardian to attend a school in the Roma Independent School District.

The Monitor photos by Gabe Hernandez A student walks across the Miguel Aleman Bridge from Mexico to the United States with her guardian to attend a school in the Roma Independent School District.

A quick glance at all the border-binary related news for the week brought this amazing story to my attention.

“In so many families, the community is not divided by a border like the land,” said Elaine Hampton, a University of Texas-El Paso professor who has studied educational systems on both sides of the border. “It makes it hard to peg exactly where you live. What constitutes a permanent address?”

I think that is a critical question. There is no permanent and stable ‘identity’ and moreover, life in itself is not ‘permanent’ so how can anyone have a ‘permanent address?’ More people than ever before work, study and live outside countries where they were born and the numbers are likely to go up.

Coming back to the story, I am often amazed at the lengths that some parents go for their children, to provide them with a better future (or what they deem a better future). The presence of these students in schools across the border most probably enriches the classroom and provides for a greater cultural experience for everyone.

Of course, the nativists–devoid of any sense of history and borderlands culture–are going to express another round of outrage i.e. “Look they are sending their illegal kids to our schools, committing crimes by lying on public documents, overcrowding them, and decreasing standardized scores all at our expense!”

Look beyond the imaginary lines on a map. These kids know how to do that and challenge those arbitrary boundaries every school day. Why can’t everyone else?

Documentary ‘Border’ – Masquerading as Neither ‘Left’ nor ‘Right’

// September 15th, 2008 // No Comments » // Anti-Capitalism, Immigration, Nationalism, Racism

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y170/elijahfell/l_8b013776dc5c20a4d3f0d37a356fc451.jpg

From the Press Release (propaganda) of this new pro-restrictionist, pro-Minutemen ‘Documentary’ called ‘Border’:

The shocking documentary ‘Border’ shows how a porous border and limited enforcement enables human smugglers and drug traffickers to extort, rape, murder and humiliate those seeking a better life in the United States.

Destroying the notion that those who want to secure the border are racist xenophobic bigots, filmmaker Chris Burgard shows how the predominantly Hispanic property owners and law enforcement personnel on US side of the border are fighting a war against drug cartels that move people and drugs across the unforgiving and desolate desert terrain.

Contrary to the talking points of the so-called ‘immigrants rights’ groups, Burgard shows how illegal immigrants are sometimes locked into indentured servitude to the smugglers who’ve delivered them to safe houses in cities like Tucson and Phoenix. The smugglers, commonly known as ‘Coyotes,’ threaten to kill the families of the newly arrived immigrants if they don’t pay extortion money. Sometimes, this servitude can go on for years.

The claims made in this press release are ludicrous. Pro-immigrant rights group online such as The Sanctuary have never supported the smuggling of ‘illegal immigrants’ and indentured servitude. We even have huge reservations about guest-worker programs that could potentially create a separate class of laborers more prone to exploitation.

Furthermore, the documentary deceptively tries to claim that since immigrants trying to come into the United States through porous borders have to undergo extraordinary dangers, border enforcement works in favor of these immigrants?! What? First, try telling that to the families of migrant workers that are shot by the U.S. border patrol. Second, if the borders were indeed so ‘porous,’ wouldn’t coming over be child’s play? And third, do you seriously expect us to believe that the Minutemen are patrolling the border to protect ‘illegal immigrants’ and stop drug cartels? The fact that the documentary symphatizes with the Minutemen should be enough to stray clear of it.

The biggest fallacy of the documentary is the assumption that border enforcement is somehow the solution to ‘illegal immigration’ and all the dangers surrounding it. However, if immigration from Mexico and Latin American countries was easier, if people did not need to wait in line for 20 years to reunite with family, if the category for unskilled work visas was not riddled with bureaucracy, if migrant workers could migrate easily across borders, they would not be desperate enough to hire coyotes, risk exploitation and harm crossing over the desert terrain or Rio Grande.

If, in Latin America, the United States did not support the disproportionate elite & multinational corporation ownership of lands primarily used for agriculture that consequently prevented people from sustaining themselves, if it did not ruin economies and livelihoods by waging a war against narcotics while simultaneously selling those narcotics to arm reactionary movements, if this country worked to make labor as free and mobile as capital, a large number of migrants would have no reason to flee ‘North’ in order to survive and make a living.

The border, and enforcement of walls erected to keep out the unknown–whether it is done in protection of or from the unknown–still constructs and reifies differences, still otherizes. The documentary is simply more nativist propaganda masquerading as impartial ‘truth.’

Foucault on Geography and Population

// August 31st, 2008 // No Comments » // Immigration, Political Theory, Racism

“One might wonder, as a conceit or a hypothesis, whether geographical knowledge doesn’t carry within itself the circle of the frontier, whether this be a national, departmental or cantonal frontier; and hence, whether one shouldn’t add to the figures of internment you have indicated–that of the madmen, the criminal, the patient, the proletariat–the national internment of the citizen-soldier. Wouldn’t we have here a space of confinement which is both infinitely vaster and less hermetic”

Foucault: That’s a very appealing notion. And the inmate, in your view, would be a national man? Because the geographical discourse which justifies frontiers is that of nationalism?”

(Questions on Geography, Power/Knowledge)

I think the question can be seen assuming and also leading us towards a carceral archipelago–how a punitive system is physically dispersed and yet covers the entirety of society. One of the topics I really want to cover on this blog in the near future is Foucault’s concept of the ‘apparatuses of security’ and how they are applicable to our society. In liberal societies and the liberal international order, we are led to believe that our ‘freedoms’ require ‘apparatuses of security.’ As Foucault states, “Freedom is nothing else but the correlative of apparatuses of security.”

Stemming from this is my concern about the ‘archipelago of detention,’ especially concerning the increasing confinement of mobility regarding migrant bodies–bodies that are constructed and labeled as ‘criminal.’

Foucault also lays out a population/people distinction in Security, Territory and Population that is worthy of further exploration. Population has two meanings — one denotes a group of subjects with rights or subjects to a sovereign etc. but the one we are interested in is population as a process that needs regulation and management, a process that correlates with the awareness of the ‘public’ and maybe even the sharp binaries of citizen/non-citizen. Now, while Foucault poses the question of the ‘inmate’ as the “national man” and that is true since borders, citizenship and nationality are all confinements, I do want to focus on the (bi)(trans)(multi)-national Others as inmates, both literally and figuratively. And I don’t think we can leave economics out of the picture.

This post here – Documenting the ‘birth’ of illegal immigration, while not perfect, serves as a start and historical background in terms of the United States context.

Critique of Borders – Canada no longer visible from Derby Line, Vermont

// August 25th, 2008 // 2 Comments » // Gender, Immigration, Nationalism, Political Theory

Since this site is called ‘No Borders and Binaries,’ lets revisit the philosophy behind that term. The creation of a bordered world is a deliberate attempt to divide, contain and isolate communities, to forget about arbitrary and ‘disorderly’ origins, in order to create a ‘more ordered, more secure world’–an impossible goal. See the case of Derby Line in Vermont below.

One library, two countries by Soul of Beer.

The border fence between Canada and America in Derby Line, Vermont is spreading hatred and discontent among residents. The United Press International reports:

Derby Line, which has a shared library with the neighboring Canadian community of Stanstead, has had lettering painted on three side streets: “Canada” on one side, “U.S.A.” on the other. Then came an influx of U.S. Border Patrol agents who chased motorists who ignored signs telling drivers to use official entry points.

The Washington Post (NYSE:WPO) reported Sunday that there was a proposal last year to erect fences on the town’s small streets to officially barricade the United States from Canada.

“They’re stirring up a little hate and discontent with that deal,” said Claire Currier, who grew up in the border area. “It’s like putting up a barrier. We’ve all intermingled for years.”

See NPR for more coverage of this issue.

The residents are told that it is a matter of national security, that our borders are porous, that terrorists could enter the border through these unsecured places. It doesn’t seem to matter that the people living in harmony across the border, intermingling often, don’t like the idea of a fence that would create barriers amongst them, deny them access to golf clubs, libraries, shopping malls and other activities they share together. And then there are those that think that Vermont should belong to Canada.
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Illegal Immigration Increasing Job Opportunities – Apply Today!

// August 21st, 2008 // No Comments » // Immigration, Racism

Want a good, steady and stable job with great benefits? Head for the border!

Border Patrol agents earn at least $36,000 to start and $70,000 within three years.

ON THE WEB Information on becoming a U.S. Border Patrol agent: www.borderpatrol.gov

“There’s no chance of layoffs, especially with the way the world is going right now. It’s steady work,” said Steven Passement, 39, who has been an agent for 12 years.

Agents must be willing to spend their first three years along the nation’s southern border in Texas, New Mexico, California and Arizona. Their work involves catching illegal immigrants, terrorists and drug smugglers.

Later, agents can transfer to jobs in areas including the coastline or Canadian border, Passement said.

The Minutemen*, ALIPAC* and other nativists* that ‘copy-n-paste’ their hate speech all over the web, especially about those ‘illegal aliens taking their jobs’ should jump at this opportunity! According to the Border Patrol, they are looking to add 2000 more border patrol agents by the end of the year — if you believe in the ‘border fence’ and restrictive immigration policies, why are you still reading this?

APPLY TODAY!

* Might be ineligible prima facie due to lack of aptitude and fitness. The process includes filling out an online application and taking a 30-minute practice test to help recruits prepare for the real entrance exam, which takes 41/2 hours, with only a 40 percent passing rate. The physical test involves 25 sit-ups and 20 push-ups, each within a minute, and a five-minute test on a stair climber. Those who are accepted go to 55 days of basic training in New Mexico. If they don’t speak Spanish, they must take a 40-day crash course.

I think that is what kills the deal for the poor nativists–they still have to learn Spanish for their ‘perfect’ job.

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