Straddling the Border
Genevieve Curtis explores the plight of those straddling the U.S.-Mexican border.
A new global order has forged power blocs that transcend the limits of national boundaries. In a world of cultural collision and intense economic integration, the ebb and flow of the global economic system plays out in real time on the United States-Mexico border, with little regard for the human element that suffers in the elusive pursuit of the American Dream.
Every day, the twisted love affair between the Developed World and Developing World persists on this porous border. U.S. ministers hold weekly mass for Mexicans and pass communion through the mesh fence. Soccer balls (which may or may not contain narcotics) are propelled over the fence in the spirit of international amistad. A complex interplay of economic and social disparities has created the conditions for the most frequently crossed international border in the world, and no other border reveals such a narrative of inequality.
The U.S. perception of the border is discernible in the policy and militarism on its side of the fence. Heavy regulation is enforced by the U.S., exposing its national insecurities in this virtual war zone. Mexican nationals represent 39 to 55 per cent of undocumented immigrants in the U.S., but they represent 90 per cent of those arrested for illegal entry by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). The most persecuted identity that roams the surrounding borderlands is the international worker, the Hispanic face that lives alongside U.S. Border Patrol and INS federal agents.
Migrants are entities of labour engaged in a complex dialogue with capitalism, which in one voice promotes their employment in the U.S. marketplace, yet in another regulates and controls labour without generic standards of protection for migrants. Mexico and the U.S. are the world’s two largest co-producers [of what? or did you mean in the region?] and remittances from Mexicans living in the United States are the second largest source of foreign income in Mexico. The two states are co-dependent, yet the U.S. is enacting legislation that effectively erects more barriers to entry for the Mexican people of the borderlands.
The militarised fence, federal agents and U.S. border protection legislation are in place primarily to impede the mobility of the international economic migrant, a unique figure of these borderlands. The majority of U.S. military forces on the border are cantered around key urban crossing points. This has the effect of driving migration underground to hazardous regions along the Rio Grande, where approximately 300 people die each year, either at the hands of vicious coyotes (human traffickers) and U.S. vigilantes, or as a result of the harsh conditions that characterise the region.
American mythology has always elevated the hero and pioneer to a glorified position. The 46 government agencies that operate along the border are less of a manifestation of this tale of American strength and exceptionalism than a response to the looming threat of a new frontier. The border is a lens into a future bi-national quasi-state. The dollar and peso, street peddler and middle manager collide in this part of the world in an uneasy milieu.
Is this the model of a new paramilitary society? In a world where identity is now fluid rather than concrete, is this clash of civilisations the inevitable future for a world where nationalities shift and boundaries are transparent?
Ultimately, the U.S.-Mexico border tension is symptomatic of the international economic system as a whole, with maquiladoras (factories) that demand high profits and provide low wages. In the U.S., there are draconian levels of regulation for illegal immigrants, but virtually no regulation of trade and the workplaces that employ these people. A regulatory balance must be reached to nullify the effects of a socially and politically disenfranchised group of immigrants who are drawn across the border by the labour demands of U.S. industries and the stark economic and political disparity that separates the two.
The current economic conditions conducive to success in a hyper-capitalised world have necessitated the imposition of structural adjustment programs in Mexico. This has had the adverse effect of encouraging labour migration to the U.S., as jobs are shed due to the decreasing value of labour and the privatisation of industries. Sociologist Douglas Massey argues that the surge in undocumented migrants in the U.S. is the result of the development of free trade zones and neo-liberal policies of market consolidation. The structural inequalities created by the global economic system reinforce the immobility and danger of the illegal Mexican workforce.
It is the human element in this conflicted region that resonates most strongly: people who are herded into tiny trucks like cattle, abandoned by their drivers and left to die in the U.S. desert; women forced to sell themselves to make it over the line. These stories speak powerfully of human vulnerability on the border and an ongoing crisis that will not be curbed until legislation addresses the paradox by which these immigrants live: they are hunted, yet continue to provide essential services to prop up the U.S. economy.
