The Deaths Map
Jeremy Harding writes about the war on America’s southern border
Migration is said to be good for host cultures. Geographers, demographers and business people believe it is, especially in the US, where one migrant group after another – Jews, Poles, Italians, Irish – has auditioned for a role in the great musical of American identity. The competition has been bitter, especially between newcomers and predecessors, and the typecasting has been crude, yet sooner or later every minority earns its place in the chorus. Nonetheless there’s a growing sense in some parts of the US that enough is enough, the stage is full to capacity and the show can no longer go on as it has. The source of this impatience is illegal immigration from Mexico, which is no longer seen primarily as a supply of service employees, farm labour and building workers, but as a threat to an indebted nation still embroiled in distant wars, with land borders to north and south that it can’t patrol as effectively as it would like and unemployment hovering at around 9 per cent. The US already has more than 11 million unauthorised migrants. About six and a half million are from Mexico and another two million from other parts of Latin America. Every year, many thousands more are crossing from Mexico without permission, to swell their ranks. Roughly 500,000 Hispanics – 8 per cent of the population of the state – are living in Arizona without authorisation. Arizona has become an operational front in yet another desert conflict.
The battle against illegal migration is a domestic version of America’s interventions overseas, with many of the same trappings: big manpower commitments, militarisation, pursuit, detection, rendition, loss of life. The Mexican border was already the focus of attention before 9/11; it is now a fixation that shows no signs of abating even as Obama draws down the numbers abroad. Despite war-weariness at home, war has remained the model for curbing illegal immigration; territorial integrity and the preservation of national identity are the goals. Unlike the invasion of Iraq, this is a respectable struggle – all nation states assert the right to secure borders. Yet watertight security is becoming harder to achieve as the global era brings new pressures to bear on the frontier, adding to the older challenge posed by people wishing to move freely. At fortified boundaries, frailty lurks beneath the show of strength.
The tough stance on the US southern border is fuelling bitter animosities. It endorses the north-south divide between two continents and two big economies, and gives offence in Mexico, where the northerly movement of undocumented people is seen as a vital form of exchange for both countries. Political liberals in the US tend to agree on this, seeing the benefits to Mexicans and the families they support from abroad. So do corporate boards and chambers of commerce, whose members celebrate migrant labour, on or off the books: that’s business at the price of immigration control. Then there are the ultras, neoliberals who favour greater freedom of human movement, in step with the boundless mobility of capital: that’s business at all costs, above and beyond the petty constraints of sovereignty. But conservatives in the South-West don’t like what they’re seeing and in Arizona they have drafted state laws on illegal immigration that vex the federal courts and alienate the business community. Most worrying, they raise local tension between Hispanics and whites. Over the last ten years, beefed-up border control has led to many more deaths among migrants, forcing them to find alternative routes through remote desert in their quest for a livelihood. In this thicket of dangerous contradictions, the illegal alien is both villain and victim. The question is whether punitive legislation and warlike methods of enforcement can strengthen the frontier or whether they turn manageable disorder into a disaster....
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