Law, Geography, and Ethics in Global Undocumented Migration
Why would anyone spend four years studying the immigration courts? And why would a geographer (of all people) do such a thing?
That’s what I had to ask myself when I was finishing my dissertation. What I’m sharing with you today is the answer—well, “one” answer—to that question that functions as the opening section of my dissertation titled “Notice to Appear.”
As anyone who has written a dissertation or thesis will tell you, there’s a lot that in hindsight feels inadequately articulated and explored—even embarrassing. But the opening section below, general as it is, holds up reasonably well as an entry point into understanding my own orientation to research on the practice of immigration law. I share it here (somewhat nervously!) as an example of how I have tried to think about this research over the years. Maybe you’ll find it useful, too.
I am including an image of the Carl B. Stokes Federal Courthouse in Cleveland where I conducted part of my dissertation fieldwork.
Academic citations have been removed for readability.
Law, Geography, and Ethics in Global Undocumented Migration
A paramount question for contemporary human geographers concerns where the planet’s population will live in the 21st century, particularly given the pervasive problems of global climate change, economic crises inherent to capitalism, and ongoing geopolitical instability. Climate change will make parts of the Earth uninhabitable and it is already leading to ecological scarcity that will drive vulnerable populations to find security through migration. Cycles of capitalist investment and disinvestment create an uneven (and constantly shifting) geography of wealth and poverty, leading not only to inequality between countries, but growing inequality within countries. Economic inequality has been shown to create push factors (relative poverty in immigrant sending countries) and pull factors (relative wealth in immigrant-receiving countries), which are likely to become exacerbated in light of the widespread failure of development policies to accomplish their stated objectives. Geopolitical instability, such as civil wars in the Middle East and gang violence in Central America —like that aftermath of World War II and the dissolution of the British Empire in South Asia before them—is creating vulnerable populations of migrants seeking basic human security.
The most pressing political obstacle to responding ethically to growing populations of migrants is the harsh landscape of nation-state borders and immigration laws that aim to restrict, control, and stigmatize human migration. Contrary to the premature claim that globalization would create a borderless world, borders remain an important way that states exercise control over territory and populations. Although some of the most important symbols of 20th-century geopolitical blocks, such as the Berlin Wall and South African Apartheid, were actively dismantled through collective political action, borders have since proliferated and become increasingly militarized along territorial boundaries. The U.S.-Mexico border is more militarized than ever, and borders across the integrated E.U. have begun to materialize at an alarming rate. The intensification and transformation of borders have created new challenges for migrants who often have neither the institutional knowledge nor the capital to navigate the complex rubric of demands, or, when they attempt to do so, are often summarily excluded from legal forms of migration. Yet, border walls and anti-immigrant laws are better at stigmatizing migrants and driving migration underground than effectively controlling migration. As a result, the policies that aim to restrict migration often force migrants to find ways to migrate outside the law.
Recent events in North America and Europe illustrate the dire consequences of restrictive migration policies. Since 2014 gang violence and poverty in Central America has pushed many people—including woman, unaccompanied children, and indigenous peoples—out of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, sending them northward to the United States to request asylum. Lacking legal means to enter the United States, many of them cross the border without authorization, and get arrested by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol. Most are detained in for-profit detention facilities, and deported without even being permitted to lodge an asylum claim back to conditions of extreme vulnerability and even death. In Europe, migrants from the Middle East and North Africa, many of them fleeing conflict in Syria and sub-Saharan Africa are making dangerous voyages across the Mediterranean to get to Europe, leading to tremendous loss of life. In just the first five months of 2016, officials estimate 203,981 migrants made the journey to the E.U. by boat, and 2,510 migrants died en route. The crisis was captured by the photograph of Alan Kurdi, a three-year Syrian boy who drowned while attempting to enter Europe with his family in 2015. Those who successfully make the maritime journey must navigate a web of humanitarian agencies, asylum registration checkpoints, and national borders within the E.U. in order to apply for asylum.
Despite the humanitarian urgency of these situations, politicians on both continents have doubled down on immigration restrictions and ramped up deportation efforts. The creation of immigrant detention facilities across the United States during the Obama administration, and particularly the rise of family detention, indicate a proliferation of spaces designed to increase migrants’ barriers to permanent entry and discourage potential migrants. The U.S. federal government has also publicized its efforts to deport asylum seekers. For instance, in early 2016, immigration officers in the United States began arresting and deporting Central American families whose asylum cases were still pending. In the E.U., despite Germany’s alleged “open-arms” policy towards refugees, the longer continent-wide trend is towards thicker borders and fewer protections for immigrants. For instance, in the summer of 2016, Sweden, long recognized for its favorable stance towards asylum-seekers, increased travel requirements on the border between Sweden and Denmark, and passed heightened restrictions to social services for asylum seekers living in the country. There is an antagonism between immigrant- and refugee-receiving countries and immigrants themselves playing out on the terrain of borders, laws, and immigration enforcement across the developed world.
Although the problem of undocumented migration is most visible and politicized in moments of acute crisis, the restrictive policies that frame these crises depend on a more complex and longstanding legal landscape of immigration controls that have to do with how states view human migration as a problem to be managed. Thus, while the ecological, economic, and geopolitical push and pull factors of migration remain important for understanding migration dynamics, an understanding of the legal landscape of immigration restrictions makes it is possible to see the complex relationship between states, law, and migrants. Moreover, humanitarian responses to recent migration crises, important as they are in moments of acute need, are inadequate to address the systemic bulwark of immigration policies and practices that control immigration through increasingly complex, restrictive, and punitive legal regimes.
This dissertation grew out of an interest in understanding the legal and political geographies of immigration control regimes. I was driven by three goals. First, I wanted to understand what makes illegal migration illegal. I wanted to move beyond legal metaphors and into the realm of legal practice. Second, I wanted to focus on the lives most central to immigration control regimes, including those immigrants and their families who are targeted by immigration laws, but also the attorneys, judges, and government bureaucrats whose labor contributes to the immigration control systems. Third, I wanted the research project to incorporate the growing immigrant rights movement in the United States, a movement that includes legal, policy-based, and political activism directed towards protecting and advancing the rights of non-citizens. Taken together, this dissertation project was designed to critique the legal regime of immigration laws as they work in practice, to investigate the everyday spaces where the state decides who is deportable and who is not, and to understand how immigrants resist or challenge their deportation. I wanted to investigate undocumented migration as a global geographic problem but do so through a grounded and socially engaged approach.
The immigration court system emerged as a crucial but overlooked site where it became possible for me to address these questions and goals. During preliminary fieldwork, I realized that there was much more to the legal aspects of immigration control than just how immigrants were arrested and deported. Through ethnographic fieldwork with immigration attorneys and immigrant rights activists, interviews with law enforcement, and observations of courtroom proceedings, I began to realize that much of the process for deciding who is allowed to stay in the United States and who is deported takes place in and through the immigration courts. The courts are spaces of deportation, bordering, and state power. As I show throughout the dissertation, the courts decide complex legal questions about who belongs and who doesn’t, and therefore the courts are a place where differences between legality and illegality are produced, felt, and contested. Indeed, if immigration restrictions are a way for the state to posit a line between who belongs and who does not, then the courts are an important place where that line is drawn. Immigration courts are, therefore, a space that connects the everyday practice of immigration law and politics with the rise of restrictive and punitive immigration control regimes, and provides significant insights into what it means to become illegalized through law. Moreover, a practical yet critical understanding of immigration cases provides insight into the human costs and consequences of the rise of deportation-central approaches to migration control in the United States and elsewhere.
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