Islands of Sovereignty

Haitian Migration and the Borders of Empire

Jeffrey S. Kahn

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780226587554
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Law Theory & Practice
• Index: Law

In Islands of Sovereignty, anthropologist and legal scholar Jeffrey S. Kahn offers a new interpretation of the transformation of US borders during the late twentieth century and its implications for our understanding of the nation-state as a legal and political form. Kahn takes us on a voyage into the immigration tribunals of South Florida, the Coast Guard vessels patrolling the northern Caribbean, and the camps of Guantánamo Bay—once the world's largest US-operated migrant detention facility—to explore how litigation concerning the fate of Haitian asylum seekers gave birth to a novel paradigm of offshore oceanic migration policing. Combining ethnography—in Haiti, at Guantánamo, and alongside US migration patrols in the Caribbean—with in-depth archival research, Kahn expounds a nuanced theory of liberal empire's dynamic tensions and its racialized geographies of securitization. An innovative historical anthropology of the modern legal imagination, Islands of Sovereignty forces us to reconsider the significance of the rise of the current US immigration border and its relation to broader shifts in the legal infrastructure of contemporary nation-states across the globe.

Chapter 1

The Political and the Economic

In the spring of 2007, I was traveling aboard a fifteen-foot wooden sloop along the northern coast of Haiti’s southwestern peninsula with Bernard, a skilled mariner and twice over “guest” of the joint task forces that operated the asylum-screening camps at Guantánamo during the early 1990s. We had left the provincial capital of Jérémie and were heading to a cluster of small seaside towns to conduct interviews with residents who, like Bernard, had been repatriated from Guantánamo during the previous decade.

Bernard had selected an old fishing companion, Luc, as the lone crewman for the voyage. The three of us worked the sheets and, when the wind died, the oars of the small craft, conversing as we made our way toward the Cayemite peninsula. Despite being of different generations—Luc was in his sixties and Bernard half that—the two had long fished the deepwater “channel” just offshore in vessels nearly identical to the one that was carrying us eastward. Not far from Jérémie, our conversation unexpectedly turned toward Luc’s time as a member of François “Papa Doc” Duvalier’s militia, known as the tonton makout, a reference to the bogeyman of Haitian lore who, the stories went, had a nasty penchant for carrying away naughty children in his straw basket.1 Upon hearing Luc had served as a makout, I was filled with an admittedly morbid curiosity: Jérémie’s miliciens, as they were also called, were notorious for having slaughtered dozens of the town’s mulâtre population during the late summer and early autumn of 1964 in partial retaliation for an invasion by a small group of predominantly light-skinned rebels (as I will show, the detail of skin color is relevant) operating under the name Jeune Haiti (Diederich and Burt 1991, 299).2 The massacre, widely known as the vespers of Jérémie, was one of the most brutal of the early Duvalier years.

Coverage of the killings was de rigueur in the many journalistic accounts of Papa Doc’s consolidation of power following his ascension to the national palace in 1957. Personally, I had recalled how Elizabeth Abbott’s gruesome version of the tale—bordering on the pornographic in its detail—had featured the makout Saint-Ange Bontemps as one of the more sinister players involved in the killings. Per Abbott’s (1988) reporting, Bontemps was particularly notable for his hatred of the town’s mulâtres and for the relish with which he took to purging them as retaliation for the actions of the Jeune Haiti guerrillas, some of whom were related to the targeted families while others simply shared a similar phenotype and social class.

I asked Luc if he knew Bontemps, and he replied without hesitation that he had been his “good friend.” Bernard appeared a bit surprised and asked if it was true that Bontemps and his band of makout had thrown “mulatto” children in the air and skewered them on bayonets, something he had heard about in his youth, though he himself was born nearly a decade after the murders. Luc responded with a “yes” and a nod. Disgusted, Bernard called Bontemps a criminal, and with that the conversation ended. Years later Luc would boast to me that he had once been stationed at Fort Dimanche, the makout-run political prison in Port-au-Prince that was synonymous with torture and political executions during the reign of Papa Doc and his son, Jean-Claude, who ruled Haiti in succession between 1957 and 1986. Hidden beneath Luc’s warm exterior was a darker history of, at the very least, direct complicity in some of the atrocities of the Duvalier dynasty.

Luc’s recollections were a reminder of how deeply Haitian lives had once been shaped by the sometimes banal, sometimes spectacular repression of the Duvalier security apparatus. It was also an eruption of a very particular moment of the Haitian past into its present—a part of the mythologized canon of makout brutality that earlier generations of Haitians had known so well and that had begun to fade in the public imagination. In this offhand allusion to the reign of the militia and, after my own prompting, the vespers with which they had become associated in Jérémie, one can see a crystallization of the reach of Papa Doc’s networks and the excessive nature of his style of retaliation (the victims had little to do with the invasion beyond kinship and color).

Bernard, decades younger than Luc, had been born after the Papa Doc years, coming of age under his son, Jean-Claude, and the succession of military governments that followed in the wake of his 1986 ouster. He too had a story of state-sanctioned violence—one that I had heard many times, though he would not recount it on this particular voyage. Bernard’s tale focused on the upheaval following the overthrow of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1991, a period when the military and former makout were unleashed on the population once again. Rather than confirming the horrors of the Duvalier years or the widespread cruelty of the junta that ruled Haiti following Aristide’s forced exile, however, Bernard’s story represented a different, albeit no less canonical, narrative of Haiti’s political drama—the stereotype of the “economic migrant” seeking asylum with false tales of persecution.

The aspect of Bernard’s tale that is of interest here involved a voyage known as a kanntè baz—a type of migration by sea that emerged in the early 1990s in which the goal was not to evade Coast Guard patrols but to be intercepted by them in hopes of being taken to Guantánamo (the “base” to which the aforementioned Creole word baz refers) for an interview and, possibly, eventual resettlement in the United States (see chapter 6). Bernard had indeed supported Aristide, like many other young men and women; however, he had not been actively involved in politics, nor did he actually imagine himself a high-priority target in the days following Aristide’s ouster. At Guantánamo, though, he told the INS asylum prescreening interviewers that his father, whom he falsely described as a security guard at one of Aristide’s political headquarters, had been killed in the bout of score settling that had followed the 1991 coup.3 When the news reached Bernard of his father’s death, the story went, he fled to the waterfront of his small town and stowed away in a large sailing vessel that would eventually carry him into the arms of the Coast Guard and, later, to Guantánamo. Bernard’s account was a fabrication. He had fled Haiti not because his father had been assassinated and paramilitary goons were on his trail but for a chance at a better life, lavi miyò in Creole. In short, Bernard was the quintessential “economic migrant” bemoaned by American politicians and bureaucrats alike since Haitians began arriving consistently on US shores in the early 1970s.

As I will show in the pages ahead, much of the legal and political maneuvering over the question of Haitian migration that would unfold from the 1970s through the 2000s cohered around two causal explanations implicit in the two narratives recounted above—one asserting the dominance of political persecution and the other the primacy of economic push factors in the grinding exodus from Haiti’s impoverished urban slums and rural backwaters. Discourses regarding the morally legitimate and legally mandated response to Haitian migration crystallized around this bipolar structure. The vespers supported the legitimacy of the political explanation: Haiti faced a form of widespread political violence that could become all-encompassing, pulling even those with little involvement in actual political subversion—like the family members of the Jeune Haiti rebels—into the crosshairs of state repression. Bernard’s false story, on the other hand, embodied the truth of a more cynical version of events in Haiti: the “boat people” were not refugees; they were economic migrants, selling the lie of political persecution to secure a ticket to a more prosperous existence.

Throughout the remainder of the chapter, I argue that the Manichean tendency that has undergirded narrations of Haitian migration is rooted in a long-standing divide within international law, US law, and capitalist modernity itself between the political and the economic qua categories of social action and experience. Through the lens of this divide, I will begin to examine the emergent moral geographies that governed US responses to Haitian migration. Part of that endeavor requires that one look to the types of interventions—from massive policing programs to market-oriented development schemes—this polarity authorized within the institutional worlds of the various agencies working on the question of how these Haitian asylum seekers were to be treated. This account is meant to provide the lineaments of that type of event history that all books require as the communicative conditions of possibility for the conversation they hope to open, though it does more than that. It also aims to illuminate the constraints (and affordances) provided by the aforementioned scales of legal terrain on the dueling representations of Duvalierism that arose during the latter half of the twentieth century, something that has gone largely unnoticed in the literature on this period. I also have taken care to mold the historical exposition with an eye to demonstrating the ways US transnational interventions in governing Haitian mobility trouble theorizations of the dissonant interplay between free markets and coercive state power within neoliberal ideologies, a contribution that will emerge into clearer focus as the chapter proceeds.

The Political and the Economic

The exaggerated dichotomy of politics versus economics as explanatory models of Haitian migration does not merely point to divergent understandings of the on-the-ground facts of persecution (or lack thereof) in Haiti; it indexes a deeper juridico-moral stance vis-à-vis Haitian mobility and migrant mobility more generally. The opposition itself and its implications for an ethics of American hospitality are rooted in the very structure of international refugee law and its domestic (or, in the European argot, municipal) codifications. In US law, for example, the refugee and asylee definitions (the former referring to individuals processed overseas and the latter to individuals applying for relief within the United States) are taken almost verbatim from the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, which has been interpreted to extend its protections to those facing persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion while excluding those forced to flee for economic reasons.4 Although the status “economic migrant” does not appear within the treaty or statutory language, it exists as a residual category that more often than not encompasses those excluded by the narrow criteria of the persecution definition. The underlying split between the violence of the vespers and the economic motivations behind Bernard’s asylum plea is, in other words, etched into US law as an abstract duality that has long ordered ways of perceiving the Haitian political landscape and hypostasized the narratives meant to depict it.

This is not to say that the warring accounts of the influence of political repression versus economic degradation on Haitian mobility are epiphenomenal to the international refugee definition’s exclusive emphasis on state persecution. To the contrary, existing accounts of the Duvalier dynasty as a politicoeconomic system were also inflected by the strategies of exile political movements, the preferences of media editorial staff (including a racialized taste for the “primitive” and salacious [A. Wilentz 1989, 22–23]), and even the nature of debates within the academy over how exactly to characterize Duvalierism, as the mode of governance associated with the father-son dynasty came to be known. Nonetheless, the classificatory structure provided by US refugee and asylum law remained consequential because it set the contours of state duties and constraints, thereby establishing an orienting framework for particular actors interested in harnessing state power for institutional ends. This might include, for instance, efforts by various factions of the Haitian democratic movement in exile to destabilize the Duvalier regime through US court-sanctioned acknowledgments of its brutality, or it might consist of the decision on the part of the top echelons of the Department of State and other institutions within the executive to implicitly authorize the INS bureaucracy to foreclose asylum claims filed by applicants fleeing American Cold War allies (more on this in chapter 2). The salience of the political and the economic as categories (explicit and implicitly residual, respectively) within US asylum law meant that those wishing to work the levers of state power needed to orient their rhetorical labor accordingly.

The opposition of the political and the economic, of course, runs deeper than the particularities of this highly specialized area of the US legal code. At its broadest, it is a quintessentially modern divide, evinced in the very notion of economy and society, as opposed to economy in society, and the disembeddedness of the market as a sphere apart that the conjunction connotes (Polanyi 1957).5 In the context of an American capitalist modernity, the separation has endured, albeit to varying degrees, through the Lochner era’s apotheosis of the freedom of contract (Ackerman 1991; Amar 2012), the overlapping Progressive era’s more technocratic interventions, the New Deal era’s quasi-managerial planning, and the postwar period’s individualistic, consumer driven Keynesianism (Moyn 2018).6 It has grown particularly acute, however, with classical economic liberalism’s rebirth in the 1970s, often referred to within academic circles under the broad category of “neoliberalism” and exemplified by the Chicago School of Economics’ market fundamentalism, the deregulatory agenda that intensified during the Reagan years, and the emergence of the Washington Consensus’s faith in market liberalization as a cure-all development strategy for the woes of the “third world” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2001; Harvey 2005; Harcourt 2011).7

Most important, for our purposes, is the return to certain spheres of common sense of the notion that the economic exists as an autonomous, natural domain, which, if it is to function according to its own laws, should be left to self-regulate (Harcourt 2011). This stance has undergirded, although not always in such extreme terms, the ostensible logic of Cold War dispute, with its own bipolarity revolving around the distinction between those states that recognized this divide between the political and the economic (to a sufficient degree) and those that did not. More than just a rubric for categorizing the Cold War geographies of friend and foe along an axis of openness to market penetration, the notion of the economy as an autonomous sphere, an always imperfectly realized distinction in actuality, also gave greater heft to the sorting of legitimate political refugees and undeserving economic migrants. To recognize the latter under the conditions of American state welfarism of the 1970s, however weak it may have been in comparison to its European cousins, would have been tantamount to endorsing a universal vision of the social and economic rights US delegations had so opposed in the negotiations over the postwar human rights instruments (Kirkup and Evans 2009). Not only that, it would have placed the United States in the position of guarantor of such rights on a global scale by opening the nation’s gates to the world’s poor in the midst of a Cold War aimed at eradicating such ideologies of entitlement.

The continued purchase of the separation of political and economic push factors was certainly a matter of pragmatic calculation—an effort to prevent the massive population movements that such a global orientation to equality, or even minimum subsistence, would provoke. But the staying power of the duality was also a matter of ideological coherence and implicit Cold War political messaging with regard to the nature of the economy as a private arena driven by private choices that had little to do with the public rights of refugee law (Ramji-Nogales 2014). That is, the economic remained private except insofar as leftist regimes abrogated the distinction themselves with their own ostensible commitment to central planning. The engulfing of the economic by the political entailed in the command economies of the Soviet sphere of influence—however spurious this method of distinguishing the capitalist “first world” from the socialist “second” may have been—could transform the economic into a matter of politics and thereby open the door to those who would seek to escape the despotism that this collapse of categories supposedly created. A defector from Lithuania or a raft of Cubans would qualify, almost automatically, as “political” under this rubric. The Haitians who suffered under the authoritarianism of the Duvaliers, however, would not, due to the regime’s efforts to display an openness to “free” markets and foreign capital, so long as the ruling clique received its cut of the proceeds.

Throughout the rest of this chapter, I will be examining two types of accounts of the nature of state-sponsored violence under the Duvaliers and their successors. Each is pegged to the core duality of US refugee law: the recognition of claims based on political persecution and the rejection of claims based on other grounds, which, more often than not, were attributed to economic causes. The first type of narrative emphasizes the reality of political persecution during the reign of the Duvaliers, and, by sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit extension, its instigating role in the migration “crises” of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. The second type of narrative paints the reign of Baby Doc, as Jean-Claude was derisively called, in rosier tones and attributes migration following the death of Papa Doc almost exclusively to economic causes, which required economic solutions—preferably ones that would make Haiti’s low-cost labor available to American corporations flexible enough to subcontract assembly operations to offshore firms in and around Port-au-Prince.

While the recognition of widespread repression in Haiti tended to support an ethico-spatial vision in which Haitian movement across the seas might be recognized as legitimate within US asylum law, the arguments for an economic etiology to the migration flows supported a different geography—one of containment. Although geared toward keeping Haitians within Haiti, this more restrictive mode of producing space was not about engineering a sedentary Haitian population. Instead, it was about cultivating new, desirable patterns of human mobility internal to Haiti, ones that involved palliative modes of rural-urban labor migration meant to feed an incipient manufacturing sector in the capital, Port-au-Prince, and to reorient the balance of agricultural production from small-scale subsistence farming toward export-oriented agribusiness.

By tracing out these contrasting causal narratives of political persecution and economic underdevelopment, I begin the task of examining the geographic imaginaries that helped shape the ways in which American jurisdictional cartographies of land and sea developed over the latter decades of the twentieth century. In this instance, a closer look at the competing narratives of the political and economic roots of Haitian migration and their articulation with legal and philosophical classifications foundational to capitalist modernity will illuminate some of the orienting frames for the spatial schisms that emerged over the decades to come.

Duvalierism

In order to understand the warring accounts of the causes of Haitian migration, one has to look to the divergent logics undergirding the arguments that activists, lawyers, journalists, and government bureaucrats put forward concerning the relation between the regimes of François Duvalier and his son, Jean-Claude. In the choice of how to describe the dynasty of père and fils, one finds an isomorphism between the decision to focus on continuity or rupture and the characterization of the “Haitian problem”—as the INS would come to refer to the presence of these asylum seekers in South Florida—as political or economic in ...