Borders are martial entities. They are designed by states and political in nature: A state controls all territory within its borders and is permitted to do so through sovereignty. Though pictured as linear, the interconnected webs and means ensuring sovereignty and border control/maintenance turn the imaginarily traced boundaries into areawide umbrellas, transcending variances in space and time. Borders are boundless power weaponisations. Understanding the political nature behind borders is crucial, as it reframes common understanding and enriches our understanding of contemporary socio-political settings. To extend information on the subject, several sources, were compared and carefully analized. This approach aligns theory, practice and case studies to successfully extend general border understanding, paving the way for utopian social justice. To demonstrate that their martial nature infinitely stretches borders, this article first defines related terms in our theoretical and cultural setting. Second, the investigation behind border’s depictions as lines but functioning as surface ‘everywhere borders’ follow. Third and last, we consider immigration’s political role fueled by weaponized borders. This in-depth analysis demonstrate that the martial nature of borders effectively makes them limitless.
DEFINING BORDERS
Defining borders is crucial to identifying the ways through which they are complex political entities, ironically difficult to define. Gabriel Popescu in ‘Bordering and Ordering the Twenty-First Century: Understanding Borders’, describes borders as “social phenomena made by humans to help them organize their lives”. (Popescu, 2012:1) Humans birthed borders to distinguish the familiar ‘here’ from the unfamiliar ‘there’. (Popescu, 2012) Historically, borders have been based according to a place and time; meaning borders aren’t fixed lines, but transitory zones and networks with fluctuating depths. Their variety in shapes and sizes rely on ability to be rooted in multiple criteria. As explained by Popescu, some borders are primarily symbolic, cultural, or social in nature, such as linguistic, religious, or class boundaries. Humans tend to carry such boundaries with them when they move through space. Other borders are primarily physical or territorial in nature, such as state borders. These borders are often well marked on the ground to assure their visibility and stability in the landscape. (Popescu, 2012) Most often boundaries are both symbolic and physical at the same time, since symbolic borders can have territorial dimensions, and territorial borders can be symbolic as well. For example, linguistic criteria may establish the location of state borders, while in other instances state borders mark the spatial limits of a language. The recent increase of territorial states established state borders as primary in most minds, consequently highlighting immigration issues.
Other borders like religion, gender, or class transcend territorial borders and show worldly patterns, affecting people further. There aren’t any natural borders separating humans, just boundaries created and defined by someone. (Popescu, 2012) To create borders, one must have the power to do so, and will do so for a gain, rendering them a power tool. Borders are used as power strategy to politicize difference and assert a group’s dominance in a certain space. Difference territorialization uses power exclusion to deeply structure societies and dictate society membership: who belongs where, who is an insider and who is an outsider, who is part of us and who is part of them (Paasi, 1996; Sack, 1986) In the words of Popescu, “Bordering space is a means of ordering space, two sides of the process by which humans appropriate space” (Popescu, 2012:2) Thus immigration or and borders are connected: State borders are political-territorial boundaries, both territorial and symbolic, limiting politically organized spaces, as well as reinforcing the idea of cohesiveness and patriotic unity in these spaces (Newman and Paasi, 1998). For example, France’s borders represent territorial limits, implying the people occupying the territory are alike. The reality, however, is more layered. In addition to France ‘s territory in Europe, the French state includes overseas territories stretching from the Pacific Ocean to South America that most overlook when visualizing the state’s borders. At the same time, inhabitants of French territory aren’t necessarily alike; French Guyana natives or New Caledonia’s hardly identify as French (Popescu, 2012:13) State borders also define territory while acquiring meaning from territorial content. Products produced in the U.S. are labelled “made in U.S.A.,” which gives them a distinctive value, but some of the product’s content might not be from America. Meanwhile the wealth of the United States suggests to a starry-eyed immigrant that they walked into a land of riches, even though America also has poor people and a lot of American wealth was generated overseas.
State borders possess existential double meaning: on one end, they draw a line between two groups, on the other, they create a contract between the two groups. It's impossible to separate these two sides of the coin: every time a line is created to separate people, there will be some that want to cross it. Such duality is the nucleus to border and security challenges. Meaning state borders create different political, social, and economic systems which’s managements/ border regimes vary from closed (North Korea), to open (European Union). (Popescu, 2012:13)
However, western border perspective insured that people couldn’t make practical sense of space without borders to delineate territory. Borders are space discontinuities that provide meaning by compartmentalizing and distinguishing units. Territory as a slice of space implies boundary existence: a territory is a bounded space (Gottmann, 1973). Border understanding is intrinsic to grasping the notion of territory since we cannot visualize a portion of space without its limits to other space portions. Borders, therefore, produce and constitute territory limitations. This notion of territoriality is the process by which territory is claimed by an individual or group. According to Sack (1986: 1), territoriality is “a spatial strategy to affect, influence, and control resources and people, by controlling area.” Territories are also defended and contested against through territoriality, form of power over space (Sack 1986). However, territorial control is asserted by border impositions regulating access. Territorial bordering is crucial in space appropriation; as a political strategy used to secure societal power (Storey 2001). Sovereignty is the linchpin between states, territorial space, and borders. Sovereignty, representant of exclusive power over territory as an aspiration and goal, rather than a fully accomplished entity. Borders and sovereignty are consequently connected since borders signal the extent of a state’s territorial power; while the state’s territorial sovereignty begins are physically limited by its borders (Popescu,2012:15) This means sovereignty is territorially exclusive. Sovereignty is entirely exerted by political power, over states. These interconnected concepts reveal a large web of martial borders, rendering them limitless in the end.
SURFACES, NOT LINES
Amilhat-Szary and Giraut(2015:6), describe an expanding dissociation between borders’ purpose and locations that requires border analysis through a mobile epistemological lens. Defying traditional border perspective as ‘fixity in time and space,’(Amilhat-Szary and Giraut, 2015:6) they identify externalization as a central contemporary concept :
“the process of territorial and administrative expansion of a given state’s migration and border policy to third countries… externalization is an explicit effort to ‘stretch the border’ in ways that multiply the institutions involved in border management and extend and rework sovereignties in new ways. In this way the definition of the border increasingly refers not to the territorial limit of the state but to the management practices directed at where the migrant is”. (Casas-Cortes, Cobarrubias, & Pickles,2015, p. 73)
In other words, immigration and border control efforts aren’t limited to physical borders, but are visible in various unexpected places all across the territory and at different checkpoints facilitated by governance. Provisional ports-of-entry, temporary courts in rural areas, and extra-territorial detention indicate incoherent, decentralized state strategy, instead of will to combine multiple detention strategies. Single geography of detention is rendered inexistant, giving space to an emerging and ever-changing aggregation of spatial tactics. (Martin & Mitchelson, 2009: 466–7) Martin and Mitchelson outline an ‘uneven topography’ of detention sites, as ‘people are held in former jails, with prisoners in existing prisons, in tent cities, on ships, in makeshift cells in courthouses, airports, and ports-of-entry the world over’, in addition to uneven legal geographies and restrictions. (Martin & Mitchelson,2009: 469) Theorization of migrant (il)legality and deportability, for example, depicts stiflingly internalized immigration and border policing, experienced by those susceptible to socio-political illegalization processes, further explained by migration aspects adressed in further sections. Illegality is experienced through a tangible sense of deportability, meaning the possibility of ousting from the entire space of the nation-state. The spatialization of ‘illegality’ turns borders-as-lines into borders-as-surfaces applicable everyday through innumerable ways. (De Genova,2002:439) Such transgression of border processes derives from De Genova’s echo of Balibar’s (2002) conclusion that ‘the border is effectively everywhere’ (De Genova,2013 :1183; Lyon,2005). The entire surface of the state is subject to immigration regulation, with ungrounded both internalized and externalized borders. Border control therefore isn’t an event occurring in a specific place, but border control is integrated to daily state affairs. Bordering is ever-more incorporated into Western developed ways of life. Generalizing bordering this way depicts them as evermore mobile, complex, differentiated, dispersed and sophisticated (Vaughan-Williams,2009). Jones and Johnson (2014) disagree with ‘everywhere border' hypothesis, arguing that though border control is done at many new sites and by many new people, new borders aren’t enmeshing Polymorphic borders (Jones & Johnson,2014: 3). Rather, they are only everywhere for specifically excluded population groups. Border in this case are segmentation and differentiation utensils. This argument is faulty as there can’t be specific excluded population if the ‘unaffected’ benefit everywhere; inequality is always implicated if some are favoured while other aren’t (Burridge, Gill, Kocher, Martin, 2017) Top-down view of the ‘everywhere ’border implies more organizational effectiveness, stability and capacity than the state has. Western governments, for example, have always struggled to control their borders (Burridge, Gill, Kocher, Martin, 2017). Despite increases in investment technology, the state of current European refugee crisis shows migration overwhelms border controls (see Papadopoulos, Stephenson, & Tsianos,2008). State worker’s control isn’t to blame, as Scholars expressed ‘border crisis’ language often expands state power all the way down to border personnel (Mountz & Hiemstra,2014). The majority of border personnel’s duty is focused on reconciling discrepancies and inconsistencies in border control systems. (Gill,2016; Heyman,1995; Mountz,2010) Borders therefore, on top of being spread all across state zones, are staged and improvised daily (Jeffrey,2012; Salter,2011). The imagined linear border abstains from considering all these realities, rendering them limitless through martialization.
Intermediaries are therefore directly or indirectly tasked with daily identification, detainment, procession and deportation of migrants. Those intermediaries are expectedly border control agencies and partners like airport liaison officers, passport controllers, air and sea port personnel, backroom government employees, interviewers, security officers of various hues, elite immigration system designers and immigration judges. The web is widened by others required to verify immigration status like social workers, hospital staff, real estate agents, university lecturers, school teachers etc. These networks highlight new nodes (schools, churches, hospitals, businesses) externally responsible for border work. Viewing borders as tents covering the entire area of a state’s surface is more accurate than viewing them as only applying to lines, once again proving border’s wide impact through politicization.
BORDERS AND MIGRATION
As globalization is essential, determination of migration laws and which migrant groups should be granted access to a state and which shouldn’t be a key challenge that highlight migration weaponization in border function. The United Nations defines a migrant as someone entering a country for twelve months or longer; but states each diversify their definition of a migrant. Some states measure migration flows based on the amount of border crossings; others measure migration by country of birth. (IOM, 2003 :8) There are also categories of temporary border crossers (e.g., tourists, commuters, and business travellers) who aren’t "migrants" per se, but remain significant to analysis of political dynamics concerning migration, security, and border control. In practice, categorizing border crossers and migrants is more complicated than expected, highlighting the extensive ways through which borders’ political nature renders them limitless areas.
The infinite ways through which borders and politics are intertwined engender weaponized migration worth inspecting. Saint Death in Mexico, closest spot to the US border, west of Juárez, in the Colonia de Anapra, the 20ft-high wire fence and steel plate run out. Here, at this imprecise location, Mexican sand morphs into US sand. (Adamson,2006) Crossing the border here is physically possible but institutionally holds a high price tag. Border crossing here doesn’t relieve any immigrant from the claws of territoriality impact or the immigration web covering the state.
Addressed recent changes in borders birthed new international migration networks. "Like other flows, whether financial or commercial, flows of ideas or information," notes a 2003 report by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), "the rising tide of people crossing frontiers is among the most reliable indicators of the intensity of globalization." (Adamson,2006: 165) According to the IOM, about 180 million people live outside their country of birth, a huge increase from 80 million 30 years ago. Yearly, 5 to 10 million people migrate across nation lines. (Adamson,2003) In the words of David Held and his co-authors, "There is now almost no state or part of the world that is not importing or exporting labour."(Adamson,2006: 166) Globalization is clearly beneficial and vital to today's society. It is immensely valued and adored, yet migration is generally glorified when the migrant is originating from the global north, and looked down on when originating from underdeveloped areas. Migration definitely also has a racist aspect, as seen with mistreatment of black people trying to escape Ukraine’s war. Priority and international aid often excluded black people and showed preferential treatment at the border. In 2000, 40 percent of international migrants lived in Western industrialized countries, approximately 19 million of them in the European Union. (Adamson,2006: 168) It is obvious that the global north hosts more migrants, but they also gain the most from migration. International students often spend more in tuition than local students, legal migrants add to the workforce and are often highly educated, and illegal migrants do the jobs that locals barely want to do in the first place, focusing on manual labour. In the Gulf states, up to 70 percent of the labour force is composed of migrants. (Adamson, 2006: 168)
In the global economy, however, the immobility of labour distinguishes it from other factors of production. Despite the sheer numbers and importance of labour migration, the flow of labour across national borders is generally less liberalized than other factors of production and is subject to more state intervention. In a global economy, the mobility of labour has not kept pace with the mobility of capital. Paul Hirst and Grahame Thompson write, "A world market for labour just does not exist in the same way that it does for goods and services. Most labour markets continue to be nationally regulated and only marginally accessible to outsiders, whether legal or illegal migrants, or professional recruitment. Moving goods and services is infinitely easier than moving labour." (Adamson,2006: 172) Restrictions on labour migration that emerged since the 1960s' European economic boom blur the lines between political and economic migration on one hand, on the other, corruption of the asylum process affect migration. The most important consequences from a humanistic, therefore liberal, perspective should be the human consequences: deaths at the U.S.-Mexican border continuously increase, approximately 1,700 in the second half of the 1990s, exhibiting a 400 percent increase between 1996 and 2000(Adamson,2006) Migration challenges states' sovereignty as enforcers grasp that effective border control demands advanced interstate cooperation in multiple sectors. Europe, an outstanding example, has unified most of its border control policy, condoning free movement in the Schengen area. The same principle applies to international coordination regarding U.S. "no-fly" or "automatic selectee" lists to filter international flights passengers entering the United States.
Overall, borders establish national territory while migration reshapes national identity. State migration policies have 2 aims: to conduct entries (border control), and determine polity entitlement (political memberships and citizenships). (Adamson,2006) Therefore migration is often considered as a threat to said national identity. National security traditions are built on national interests, derived from state identity. Even rationalist and realist perspectives on security, despite prioritizing interests over identity, recognize that models of the anal state presume a coherence in identity that international migration questions. States have historically included national, ethnic, and/or racial standards in their migration policies: U.S. immigration racial restrictions in the 19th and early 20th centuries, privileging ethnic Germans (Aussiedler) by post-World War II German immigration policy, "White Australia" policies predominated migration policies most of 20th century, automatic immigration right in Israel to Jews by the 1950 Law of Return etc. (Adamson,2006: 181) Yet this use of ethnic and racial criteria has been delegitimized as globalization increased, supported by racial equality, universal human rights, civil rights movements, multiculturalism, and economic imperatives. (Adamson,2006) The political debate regarding the migration and identity, however, remains relevant. Since borders are martialized and unlimited, nations that support globalization in terms of transportation of goods and services may still politically be against the migration aspect, illegitimately so. Ole Waever attributes this imaginary political identity crisis as "societal insecurity.” (Adamson, 2006: 181) This issue only lives for states that deduce identity and legitimacy from an ethnic nationalism, rather than looked-for civic nationalism. Cultural conservatives ague against the notion; even the highest of liberal, civic, and constitutional nations may be jeopardized by migration, as they assert liberal constitutionalism as a concept stems from a particular culture. Samuel Huntington, for example, argued recent immigration waves to the United States may sabotage its core "Anglo-Protestant" heritage. (Adamson,2006: 182) But that identity was jeopardized by the US themselves with the transatlantic trade and decision to build the nation on immigrant labour. State identity isn’t fixed. State identity is malleable and always subject to time and environment. Here, a valorisation of state identity in its current setting, upholding global north power hierarchy and maintenance. Not to say that state identity only benefits the north, but to acknowledge that movement in state identity wasn’t considered much of an issue until western power dominance was established at the expense of the global south, beginning at the colonial era. Cultural conservatism and globalization can’t coexist, despite the capitalist goal to reduce humanitarianism solely for economical gain. Borders act as a mode of governance that transcends state lines, therefore border martialization for power and economic gain will always heighten immigration due to globalization.
Borders are political entities thriving on political weaponization in all its practices. By identifying the political nature of borders, the way they operate as surfaces instead of lines and the weaponization of immigration, analysis of the tremendous impact and ironical limitlessness of borders is facilitated.
REFERENCES
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