Rethinking Border Control for a Globalizing World

A Preferred Future

Leanne Weber

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781134615889
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'armée et de la marine

This book provides a new point of departure for thinking critically and creatively about international borders and the perceived need to defend them, adopting an innovative 'preferred future' methodology.

The authors critically examine a range of 'border domains' including law, citizenship, governance, morality, security, economy, culture and civil society, which provide the means and justification for contemporary border controls, and identify early signs that the dynamics of sovereignty and borders are being fundamentally transformed under conditions of neoliberal globalization. The goal is to locate potential pathways towards the preferred future of relaxed borders, and provide a foundation for a progressive politics dedicated to moving beyond mere critique of the harm and inequity of border controls and capable of envisaging a differently bordered world.

This book will be of considerable interest to students of border studies, migration, criminology, peacemaking, critical security studies and IR in general.

1 Peace at the border

A thought experiment

Leanne Weber

Globalization and the violence of borders

On 24 May 2007, the Times of India reported the case of Mohd Lal Amer, who had been ‘duped’, it said, into buying a ‘world passport’ from a Washington-based organization calling itself the World Government (TNN 2007). According to this report, the would-be global citizen passed several clearance points en route to the United States (US) before being detained by immigration authorities, who considered the matter to be a case of cyber crime. We do not know from this report whether Mr Amer was an ingénue, fraudster or global activist, although the tone of the article suggests the former. But World Government (also known as the World Service Authority) that issues these passports through its website claims that its ‘potential travel document’ has been ‘visaed’ by 150 countries (World Service Authority 2013). This recognition is said to occur whenever a World Government document is stamped by officials at a territorial border, a process that substitutes administrative practice (most likely bureaucratic bungles) for the more usual route of international diplomacy.¹

The World Government describes itself as a non-profit group dedicated to challenging the authority of national governments to limit mobility. The group asserts that mobility is an inalienable right guaranteed under Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) (UNGA 1948). While many of us will have considerable sympathy with this goal, the promise of the UDHR or any exposition of human rights within the present state-based system would not seem to support such an aspirational reading in any straightforward way. The wording of Article 13 refers to freedom of movement ‘within the borders of each state’ and establishes an individual right to leave and return to one’s ‘own’ country. Although persuasive arguments have been made on normative grounds for open borders (Carens 1987, 2013) or increased mobility (Bauböck 2009), the territorial boundedness and implicit reference to citizenship in Article 13 cannot be easily read as supplanting the recognized right of states to control their borders. Moreover – and this is no doubt a point that drives the World Service Authority to pursue its global citizen agenda – material developments at this moment in history are operating to reinforce this state-based interpretation of border control.

As globalizing trends challenge and redefine the role of national sovereignty within the world system, developed states have opened their borders selectively to affluent visitors, skilled labour and entrepreneurs, while barricading them against others who are seen as economic, cultural or security threats. Against a backdrop of economic downturn and government austerity measures in the Global North, border control has become a growth industry. In just a few years since its inception, the European Union (EU) border control agency Frontex has become the largest policing body in Europe. Detention centres funded by the state and run by giant transnational security corporations have proliferated across the countries of the Global North, forming offshore ‘enforcement archipelagos’ (Mountz 2011). Physical walls fortified by paramilitary patrols have appeared along large stretches of the US–Mexico border and the ever-expanding eastern perimeter of the EU. Naval blockades, Customs patrols and radar surveillance are deployed along Australia’s expansive northern coastline to intercept boats carrying asylum seekers. Less visible, but equally potent in the battle against unauthorized border crossing, are the virtual borders comprising risk-based visa regimes, advanced passenger-processing databases, and networks of airline officials and ‘outposted’ immigration officers who check eligibility to board regulated flights at de facto border points in countries of origin and in transit, making legally regulated travel inaccessible to those who need it most.

The ability for individuals to cross borders has therefore emerged as a key social signifier, stratifying populations according to a ‘global hierarchy of mobility’ (Bauman 1998, 69). As has often been observed, the opening up of international borders to allow the relatively free movement of individuals has not proceeded in line with the relaxation of territorial constraints on commodities and capital, coupled with the inherent transnationalism of the internet, and in fact has been strongly resisted across the developed world. Sassen (1996, xvi) summed up these uneven developments succinctly as a ‘denationalizing of economic space’ alongside the ‘renationalizing of politics’, with border crossing emerging as a ‘strategic site of inquiry about the limits of the new order’. Spontaneous border crossing (a manifestation of bottom-up globalization) has become a conduit for wider fears about rapid change, insecurity and disorder. As Aas (2007, 82) has observed, ‘[w]hile influenced by profound global movements and transformations, the immigrant also finds himself or herself situated at the heart of local struggles for safety and security’.

Although references are often made to a ‘world in motion’, the proportion of the world’s population living outside their place of birth remains relatively modest, and the majority of migratory movement occurs within and between less-developed countries. Nevertheless, the overall accessibility of long-distance travel is a significant feature of life in late modernity, and the reaction of governments to uncontrolled cross-border movements presents the most significant barrier to the project of opening up opportunities for international travel for all. Dauvergne (2008, 2) has argued that the ‘moral panic’ over extra-legal border crossing is ‘a marker of the twenty-first century’. To varying degrees, but with no obvious exceptions, governments of the Global North have staked their capacity to govern against their ability to prevent asylum seekers and other migrants from arriving on their territories unannounced. The difference from previous eras, according to Dauvergne, is not only in the scale of population movements but also in the intervention of law through the creation of illegality, so that ‘[m]igration laws have become a site of contestation, in which nations inscribe their resistance to human rights norms and global convergence trends’ (Dauvergne 2008, 7).

It has been estimated that, globally, possibly 50 million people are resident outside their countries of birth without legal recognition, including around 12 million in the US, 0.5–1 million in the United Kingdom (UK), 3 million across Europe as a whole, and much lower figures in Canada (200,000) and Australia (40,000) (Dauvergne 2008, 13). While it may be possible in some circumstances for them to live well-adapted and fulfilled lives without legal status, in many contexts illegality leaves individuals open to exploitation and extreme social and economic marginalization. As Bosniak has noted, ‘the rights undocumented immigrants formally enjoy in the sphere of territorial personhood are often rendered irrelevant, as a practical matter, by operation of the nation’s border-regulatory authority’ (Bosniak 2006, 70). In some circumstances, policies of deliberate marginalization have been pursued to encourage ‘voluntary’ departures, as in the well-documented ‘immiseration policies’ directed against registered asylum seekers in the UK, where destitution has been used by government ‘as a weapon’ (Webber 2012, 89).

Those seeking to cross borders without legal protection also experience a range of different circumstances and official responses on their journeys, from interdiction and indefinite detention in countries of destination or transit, to exploitation by commercial facilitators, to instances of rescue and humanitarian assistance. Anthropologist Shahram Khosravi has chronicled his personal experiences as an ‘illegal traveller’ making his way from Iran to his eventual place of refuge in Sweden. He describes how irregular migrants ‘are left vulnerable not only to state violence (through regulations, political arrangements, laws, priorities, and police) but also to the violence of ordinary citizens, without being able to protect or defend themselves’ (Khosravi 2010, 3). While the vulnerability generated by a lack of access to legally regulated travel is universal, the resulting experiences vary, as is apparent from Khosravi’s (2010, 26) first-hand account: ‘Not everyone was as lucky as I was to have had a good “guide” and “facilitator”. Later in Karachi, I heard horrible stories of rape, homicide, kidnapping and blackmail of people on the borders by their smugglers.’

It might be objected that the everyday operation of border control is far more routine than these accounts suggest, that states have a recognized right to control their borders against unwanted incursions, and that blocked border crossings are not always a matter of life and death. But it is the negative impact of geographically dispersed and largely unregulated border control on vulnerable and disadvantaged groups that attracts the attention of critical border scholars. Gready (2004, 352) has noted that ‘[w]hile it is true … that globalization erases borders, it is also true that those which remain are sharp edges, more closely policed, more violent’. These heavily policed borders and their often violent effects have been analysed by critical criminologists in terms of criminalization and state crime (Pickering 2005; Green 2006; Wonders 2007) and have been described as a ‘war against illicit migrants’ (Grewcock 2009), a ‘war on asylum’ (Webber 2012) and a ‘war on “illegals”’ (Nevins 2010) in which those seeking to enter peacefully, but without authorization, are cast as the ‘enemy on the border’ (Krasmann 2007). In case the metaphor of war seems overly dramatic, one need only consider the use of military-style equipment and personnel along the most highly contested border zones; the many examples of long-term internment in specially constructed camps; the deployment of advanced technologies, intelligence and surveillance in border protection; and the level of casualties that have resulted, occasionally from direct violence perpetrated by border agents, but more often through structural violence arising from the risks engendered by illegalization (Weber and Pickering 2011). The non-governmental organization United for Intercultural Action (2012) documented 17,306 border-related deaths from the early 1990s to 1 November 2012 in Europe alone.

With reference to state culpability for the harms that arise from these border control practices, Khosravi concluded that ‘borders do not kill or want immigrants to die but are willing to tolerate casualties’ (2010, 29). The selective violence of contemporary borders can also be understood as part of a continuum of policies that not only are labelled by critics as warlike, but may also be seen to openly embrace the metaphor of war. As Michalowski has argued,

Regenerative violence is the cosmology that underlies policies that address social problems through the language of war, such as the ‘war on crime’ or the ‘war on drugs’. It is the cosmology underlying the rhetorical ‘war on terror’ and the very real US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It is also the cosmology underlying the militarization of the US border.

(Michalowski 2007, 72)

This defensive geography does not augur well for any vision of a less border-conscious world. While defusing the violence that has been produced by these forms of contemporary border control is an important goal from a human rights perspective, a peacemaking approach to borders might also promote wider objectives, such as equality of access to border crossing, as important values for a globalizing world. But it is difficult to see a pathway for achieving either of these aims. As Dauvergne (2008, 15) has argued, ‘illegal migration would be significantly reduced by halting all moves to enforce existing laws. It would be completely eliminated by repealing all laws regulating it. Neither of these options is politically possible at present’.

The objective of this collection is to explore what might be politically possible, if not in the present, then at least in the dimly foreseeable future. This approach opens up a large number of questions across a range of interdisciplinary fronts that will be pursued in the following chapters. Before considering the methodology that contributors will apply in considering future prospects for ‘peace at the border’,² the following section looks to the past – not with a view to identifying some historically deterministic trajectory that will help us predict future developments in border control, but rather to enhance our capacity to imagine a world that is differently bordered from the one we have always inhabited.

Making and unmaking the border: a history of the future

As Pratt (2005, 185) reminds us, ‘The border is an ongoing accomplishment, yet the processes by which it is continually produced are erased by its apparent self-evidence’. One way to disrupt the self-evidence of the border is to consider how the significance of particular borders has changed dramatically over time. Our capacity to imagine a future transformation in the meaning of contemporary borders can be greatly enhanced by recalling fundamental shifts that have occurred in the past in relation to both the practical and the symbolic meanings of borders and therefore in the perceived necessity to defend them. This section attempts to bring these fundamental transitions into view by presenting a potted history of the fate of parish borders in England.

This recourse to ‘historical perspective’ has a distinctly sociological purpose. In her exploration of the emergence of global assemblages, Sassen (2006, 401) engages in a rather more detailed set of ‘in-depth excavations of a few historical formations’ in order to expound an ‘analytics of change … through which to study the present’. A historically informed approach may be taken even further. For example, it has been noted that Foucault’s method ‘allows him to study and to describe the movement between past and present and between the present and the future’ (Negri 2008, 225, emphasis added). The historical case study presented here, derived solely from secondary sources, is intended merely to illustrate the broad analytics of change that led to the subordination of one particular set of borders that were once considered indispensable, in order that we might understand the foundation from which we are moving towards the future.

Parish borders that demarcated the boundaries of village life in England came into prominence after the breakdown of feudalism released men and women from serfdom and left them ‘free’ to roam beyond their estate in search of work as agricultural labourers. With parishes rather than landlords now responsible for poor relief, these fundamental changes in the organization of productive and social life created a form of suspect mobility based on poverty and class and a wariness of unknown outsiders. These problems of order were dealt with, in various combinations at various times and places, by the familiar tools of criminalization and boundary reinforcement. Karl Marx described the plight of the labouring classes during the transition from feudalism to agricultural capitalism as follows:

On the one hand, these men, suddenly dragged from their accustomed mode of life, could not immediately adapt themselves to the discipline of their new condition. They were turned in massive quantities into beggars, robbers and vagabonds … hence at the end of the fifteenth and during the whole of the sixteenth centuries, a bloody legislation against vagabondage was enforced throughout Europe.

(Marx, cited in Neocleous 2000, 17)

As Rawlings (2001, 45) explains,

Before the mid-fourteenth century it was not uncommon to argue that public policy should reflect the Christian duty to relieve all poor people, but afterwards there developed a stark separation between the ‘deserving’ and the ‘undeserving’ and a tendency to conclude that a pauper came within the latter category unless it was shown otherwise.

(Rawlings 2001, 45)

Hence, in the wake of the Black Death, the 1351 Statute of Labourers instructed populations not to give alms to ‘valiant beggars’ who were perceived as capable of working, and it attempted to curtail their mobility in response to labour shortages (Chambliss 1964). Whereas the fourteenth century vagrant was simply someone who wandered from place to place, under Tudor rule a growing number of categories, including scholars and sailors, fortune tellers, minstrels and pedlars, were subject to control over their movement. A policy of forcible return to ‘places of settlement’ – generally the village of birth – was introduced in 1531 to restore the poor to their proper place. With the rapid rise of mercantilism in the late sixteenth centur...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Acronyms and abbreviations
• Editor's preface
• 1 Peace at the border A thought experiment
• 2 The law of the border and the borders of law Rethinking border control from the perspective of the individual
• 3 The limits of inclusion Globalization, neoliberal capitalism and state policies of border control
• 4 Security and peace in the US–Mexico borderlands
• 5 Superseding citizenship
• 6 State borders, human mobility and social equality From blueprints to pathways
• 7 Open borders and the survival of national cultures
• 8 Moral communities across the border The particularism of law meets the universalism of ethics
• 9 Border protests The role of civil society in transforming border control
• 10 Conclusion Prospects for peace at the border
• Commentaries
• Rethinking borders as membranes
• From national borders to embedded borderings
• Transforming borders from below
• Afterword
• Index