Border Militarization and Migrant Suffering: A Case of Transnational Social Injury

Prologue CANDLES GUTTERED IN THE BREEZE. IN THE BACKGROUND, PALE RIBBONS DRAPED the aging adobe walls of El Tiradito, a small folk shrine in Tucson s historic barrio district. As the setting sun painted March storm clouds red and orange, 15 people formed a semicircle facing the shrine, each holding a small sheet of white paper. Most of the faces were Anglo; a few were Latino or Indian. After a brief invocation, a woman read the name written on the paper in her hands. As her voice faded, the group responded in unison with the word presente--"I am here." One by one, those gathered read the name on the paper they held, sometimes fluidly, sometimes stumbling over an unfamiliar Mexican or Indian pronunciation, or sometimes simply saying desconocida or desconocido--indicating an unidentified woman or man. Each reading was followed by a collective presente. As names accumulated on the evening breeze, some in the group wept softly. After all the names were read, the readers approached the shrine's crumbling walls and pinned what was now their sanctified piece of paper to one of the ribbons. This ritual was repeated throughout the 2006 Lenten season. By Easter, the ribbons draping El Tiradito held over 800 names of those who where known to have died in recent years attempting to cross the desert that separates the U.S-Mexico boundary from first-stop cities like Tucson and Phoenix. Framing the Problem Having stood on that and other nights with those reading the names of the dead, I begin this article with the sobering, personal awareness that every year the deserts of Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas claim the lives of hundreds of men, women, and children who enter the United States as irregular migrants. The most common narratives in the United States about migrant deaths typically frame them, at best, as the unfortunate consequences of individual decisions to risk hazardous journeys, or at worst, as appropriate punishments for breaking U.S. immigration law. These views, however, presume that the private decisions of individual migrants are the primary cause of immigration (Sassen, 1998). Decisions to immigrate and the patterns of immigration they produce, however, are the consequence of intersecting economic, political, and social forces, not the solitary choices of migrants. To better understand the forces shaping irregular migration along the U.S.-Mexico border and the policies designed to control it, from October 2005 to May 2006 I pursued what Michalowski and Dubisch (2001) term "observant participation" in the U.S. Border Patrol Tucson Sector, an area that roughly encompasses the Southeast quadrant of the State of Arizona and also contains the most heavily traveled routes for irregular migrants. In the company of others from migrant rights groups such as the Samaritans and No More Deaths, I walked migrant trails carrying water, food, diapers, and blister treatments to assist border crossers in need. I attended rallies and stood nighttime watches with anti-immigration Minutemen as they peered into the desert night "hunting" for undocumented migrants. I also worked with human rights NGOs such as the Border Action Network, Derechos Humanos, and the American Friends Service Committee as they helped to organize Tucson's Latino community into a significant force for comprehensive immigration reform. Based on these experiences, I offer four propositions. First, current border militarization policies, such as Operation "Gatekeeper" and its derivatives, unnecessarily subject irregular migrants to a broad range of social injuries. Second, these social injuries are as harmful and as wrongful as many acts designated as state crimes because they are intentionally designed to force migrants into hazardous and potentially lethal environments. Third, because these injuries result from attempts to control transnational actors in transnational contexts, they are analogous to other forms of transnational crime. …