Content area
Texto completo
Searching for Security: Boundary And Immigration Enforcement in an Age of Intensifying Globalization
JOSEPH NEVINS ([email protected]) received his Ph.D. in geography from the University of California, Los Angeles. Currently, he is a post-doctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, where he researches matters relating to the reconstruction of post-occupation East Timor. He is the author of Operation Gatekeeper: The Rise of the "Illegal Alien" and the Making of the U.S.-Mexico Boundary (Routledge, 2001).
We called for workers, and there came human beings. -- Max Frisch, Swiss playwright, referring to the "guest worker" system in Europe in the 1960s and 1970s (in Calavita, 1992: 6).
Even if we take [unjust social arrangements] as givens for purposes of immediate action in a particular context, we should not forget about our assessment of their fundamental character. Otherwise, we wind up legitimating what should only be endured (Carens, 2000: 636).
SIMILAR BOUNDARY-RELATED CONTROVERSIES MARKED THE BEGINNINGS OF THE George W. Bush and Bill Clinton presidential eras. Both concerned female nominees to cabinet positions and their relationships to "illegal" immigrant women. In the case of Bill Clinton, it came to light that his first nominee for attorney general, Zoe Baird, employed two unauthorized immigrants from Peru as domestic servants -- a common "crime" among two-career, professional couples (see Chang, 2000). Ultimately, public and official pressures forced Baird to withdraw her nomination.
A little less than eight years later, George W. Bush's original nominee for secretary of labor, conservative columnist Linda Chavez, felt compelled to withdraw her nomination after it became known that she had provided housing and money to Marta Mercado. At the time, Mercado was an unauthorized immigrant from Guatemala who, in return for what the nominee characterized as acts of charity, performed a variety of household tasks for Chavez. Ironically, Chavez had been highly critical of Zoe Baird in 1993 for employing an "illegal" (Holmes and Greenhouse, 2001).
The controversies surrounding these cabinet-level nominations are merely two of the more high-profile examples of the power of the territorial and social boundaries that divide and bring together the United States, Mexico, and the rest of the world, illustrating their blurry and simultaneously "real" nature. The ongoing efforts by the federal government to enhance the effectiveness of U.S.-Mexico boundary...