Keeping Migrants in Their Place: Technologies of Control and Racialized Public Space in Arizona

INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION IS AN AGE-OLD PHENOMENON; HOWEVER, ECONOMIC globalization and responses of nation-states to this transformation have reframed migration in the contemporary era. We use the phrase global disciplinary strategies to characterize the interlocking policies and practices, both material and discursive, used by nation-states to criminalize and regulate the mobility of transnational migrants, typically by utilizing identity markers to engage in social sorting and exclusion. Drawing on contemporary scholarship, we have identified three global disciplinary strategies that operate to racialize and criminalize recent migrants: (1) anti-immigrant discourse; (2) immigration law and policy creation; and (3) surveillance tactics and policing rituals directed at migrants and performed by federal and local law enforcement, otherwise known as "technologies of control" (Picketing and Weber, 2006). Although our broader research project touches on each of these global disciplinary strategies, in this article we examine two closely related technologies of control--surveillance and "enforcement rituals" (De Genova, 2004; 2005)--two strategies designed to keep migrants "in their place" by keeping them out of public space. We use the category "migrant" to refer to any foreign national who has crossed a border with the intention of residing in that country, whether temporarily or permanently, with legal documentation or without. As we establish below, although a relatively rich set of theoretical claims has been made about technologies of control, little empirical research has been conducted to investigate their impact on migrants' use of public space. It is this void that our research helps to fill. Utilizing the literature on neoliberal globalization, race and public space, as well as on policing and immigration enforcement, we explore the following research question: How do technologies of control shape migrants' use of, experience in, and access to public space in Arizona--a site deemed "ground zero" in the immigration debate? Technologies of Control: Surveillance, Enforcement Rituals, and Immobility The policies and practices associated with neoliberal globalization have stimulated mass migration across the globe; people migrate for many reasons, but frequently they are searching for economic and physical security (Sassen, 1998a, 1998b; Picketing and Weber, 2006). In the West, the development of global capitalism has been characterized by deindusttialization, a corresponding decline of welfare state provisions, a shift to consumption-based economies, and the casualization of the labor force (Schaeffer, 2009). The interplay of these global forces heightened the demand for an inexpensive flexible workforce, while simultaneously creating pressure to restrict access to the costly privileges of citizenship. Consequently, the plight of the "illegal migrant" has emerged as a significant manifestation of the contradictions embedded within globalization (Dauvergne, 2008; Calavita, 2005). Throughout the West, migrants are needed labor power, but unwanted citizens. Since roughly the 1980s, many countries, including the United States, Australia, Great Britain, Spain, and Italy, have developed immigration policies, discourse, and enforcement strategies characterized "by a reversal of the image of migrants and asylum seekers in public space"; migrants and refugees who were welcomed into the labor force after World War II are now "demonized as criminals, economic and social defrauders, terrorists, drug traffickers, and so forth" (Ceyhan and Tsoukala, 2002: 22). As a result of this global dynamic, politicians offer up "illegal immigration as an explanation for internal and social ills, while promising to restore state sovereignty with new strategies to 'take control' of the nation's border" (Michalowski, 2007:71). In response, many Western nation-states are employing "highly technical, increasingly punitive and innovative methods of border control" and immigration enforcement strategies that Pickering and Weber (2006: 9) term "technologies of control. …