"The border itself as a site of violence"

The bipartisan precedent for today's anti-immigrant cruelty

As we continue to watch the Trump administration’s cruel and illegal deportation blitz with horror, we’re reminded that American border enforcement authorities have meted out violence against migrants and asylum-seekers for generations — without interruption, under Democratic as well as Republican presidents. Rereading the poet, novelist, and essayist Elisa Gonzalez’s extraordinary 2022 examination of the history of brutality at the American border, I am struck above all by how timely it still feels. That is, I suppose, the painful point: Gonzalez helps us to understand modern immigration policy not as a duel between reform and reaction but rather as, in Walter Benjamin’s famous phrase, one single catastrophe. As she puts it:

Rhetoric obscures policy, which enables the perseverance of a system that — regardless of administration — brutalizes legal and illegal migrants alike. Within the context of the nation-state, who should immigrate and how they should immigrate is a political question. Yet a discourse that avoids delving into policy and history makes the politics petty and provisional.

It wasn’t until the 1920s, Gonzalez explains, that the U.S.-Mexico border became a site of systematic detention and interrogation, policed by the newly formed U.S. Border Patrol. These restrictions helped conjure up the new category of the “illegal alien.” The tougher the border, the worse the violation of penetrating it without proper authorization. Under this new framework, legal residence in the United States was positioned as a kind of prize, an official blessing bestowed only to a select group of winners. Those without it were cast as losers — people without rights, to whom anything could be done.

The existence of such a category should disturb all of us, even those who believe we are protected from falling into it ourselves. “While it may seem like pure alarmism to invoke deportation, internment, or revocation of citizenship for anyone — even a person born on U.S. soil, with parents born on U.S. soil — citizenship has been historically malleable, subject to many changes and redefinitions over time,” Gonzalez writes. Perhaps that warning no longer seems so alarmist. Looking back from today’s vantage point, it is hard to fault her judgment: “A paranoiac mindset is appropriate.”

Sincerely,

Erik Baker

Senior Editor

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Thumbnail image credit: Tony de los Reyes