I: Enforcing the Line
The escalation of US–Mexico border enforcement
Introduction
On March 13, 2018, President Donald Trump visited the San Diego sector of the US-Mexico border to inspect eight prototypes for a new barrier to prevent unwanted entry to the US. Standing 30 feet tall and featuring a variety of colors and surfaces, the models were constructed by six US contractors in one month at a cost of up to $500,000? The prototypes were a symbolic demonstration of Mr. Trump’s effort to secure the border by building a “big, very beautiful wall”, one of his most prominent campaign promises (Nixon and Qiu, 2018). The prospect of a wall rallied many of Mr. Trump's supporters and became a key rhetorical symbol during the campaign.
While unprecedented in some ways, Mr. Trump’s call for a literal wall between the US and Mexico provides only the latest illustration of the scapegoating and inflamed rhetoric that have been employed by savvy politicians and biased media outlets for decades to create a state of “moral panic” about a wide range of cross-border issues, including immigration, drugs and terrorism. To help contextualize recent efforts to strengthen US border controls, this chapter examines US border security measures in terms of the successive phases or policy "regimes” that have developed since the early 20th century. This discussion helps to evaluate the implications of the latest wave of border madness over migration from Central America, and particularly Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.
Theorizing border security escalation as moral panic
Perhaps nowhere have the contradictions of globalization been more evident and more ardently studied than along the US-Mexico border. The nearly 2,000-mile boundary constitutes the longest border between a developed and underdeveloped country and has long been a subject of efforts to strengthen security measures. In the 1970s and 1980s, for example, US law enforcement efforts ramped up in response to growing outbound Mexican migration. Scholarly works, like Joseph Wambaugh’s Lines and Shadows (1984), characterized the crack down on criminality and undocumented immigration at the border as compelling moral drama, complete with heroes (US law enforcement), villains (smugglers and bandits) and unwitting victims (undocumented immigrants). Subsequent scholarship has chronicled the development and consequences of an ever-growing border security complex that has accrued a seemingly endless quantity of resources, including physical barriers, manpower, technology and equipment (Andreas, 2000; Ong Hing, 2010; Dreby, 2010; Henderson, 2011; Simmons and Mueller, 2014).
Despite decades of enhanced law enforcement efforts, the US-Mexican border remains highly permeable to unauthorized trans-national flows of all kinds. This has, in turn, led to diametrically opposing policy recommendations. On the one hand, conservative politicians and their constituents have consistently called for ever greater investments in border security, emphasizing especially the damage caused by illicit drags and undocumented immigrants to US society. On the other hand, other critics of the current border security regime have emphasized the costs - economic, environmental and human - and the ineffectiveness of tougher border security measures in controlling drags and migration, prompting a wave of recent progressive scholarship that has begun to argue for a renewed commitment to the idea of a borderless world, reimagining and embracing the free flow of good, people, capital and ideas.3
Progressive advocates of trans-nationalism and “open borders” face an enormous challenge, and their calls have thus far fallen on deaf ears. As the Trump era has made increasingly clear, the forces of nationalism are very much alive and committed to the protecting territorial boundaries as both a manifestation and a symbol of national power and identity. Moreover, the appetite for tougher border enforcement measures appears to be growing worldwide, as public perceptions and rhetoric describe borders as lawless and out of control.4 While such fears may be founded in legitimate concerns, there is ample room for manipulation of public opinion and often the perception of cross-border threats is greatly exaggerated. As Peter Andreas argued in Border Games (2000), politicians and border security personnel have strong political and bureaucratic incentives to stoke public misunderstandings and fears about the border as a means to gain political support and marshal resources for their preferred government agencies.
As Massey et al. (2016) observes, this kind of fear mongering has been employed for decades to generate what historians and sociologists refer to as a “moral panic” about the border. Moral panics result from deep-seated public anxieties and often outlandish misconceptions, but also from the ability of social and political entrepreneurs to stoke and harness these sentiments and beliefs to achieve specific objectives.5 In this sense, contemporary border politics are especially prone to moral panics, as the very idea of a border is directly linked to the founding mythologies of any nation state. Images of territorial boundaries drawn on a map generate comforting notions of physical security and separation that do not neatly conform with the reality of how borders truly look and function on the ground. Thus, the contrast between the imagining and reality of borders creates a disjuncture that can be easily become a cause of public alarm.
Today, public fears about the border are especially ripe for moral panic as a consequence of globalization. Globalization has contributed to the massive relocation of people around the world, with an estimated 214 million people living outside their countries of origin and hundreds of millions wishing they could do so (DeParle, 2010; Esipova et al., 2011). In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the US was the destination for the largest proportion of this global wave of migration, with most of its share coming from Mexico and other parts of the Americas. Thus, it is important to examine the ways in which recent rhetoric and policies towards immigrants - especially Mexican and Central American immigrants - reflects the fears and insecurities of an age of uncertainty brought on by globalization. Below, I trace the course of US border security policy changes over the course of three distinct phases or "regimes" centered around successive moral panics over immigration, drugs and the war on terrorism. Each of these border security policy regimes has been founded on public fears and insecurities that contributed to the escalation of US-Mexico enforcement and the context of current border security debates.
