Policing Borders: Unauthorized Immigration and the Pernicious Politics of Attrition

ON APRIL 23, 2010, ARIZONA GOVERNOR JAN BREWER SIGNED THE SUPPORT OUR Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act into law. Better known as SB 1070, this law is the broadest and strictest anti-immigrant law enacted in the United States in decades. The stated purpose of SB 1070 ([section] 1) is "to discourage and deter the unlawful entry and presence of aliens and economic activity by persons unlawfully present in the United States" (State of Arizona, 2010). Its key provisions include: (1) requirements that police officers investigate the immigration status of all individuals they stop, if the officers suspect that they are in the country unlawfully; (2) mandatory detention of individuals who are arrested, even for minor offenses that would normally result in a ticket, if they cannot prove they are authorized to be in the United States; and (3) stipulations that allow law enforcement officers to arrest a person without a warrant if the officer has probable cause to believe that the person has committed an offense that makes him/her removable from the United States (see Garcia, Eig, and Kim, 2010). SB 1070 has become a lightening rod in the divisive debates over immigration reform in the United States. Amid routine pronouncements from across the political spectrum that the U.S. immigration system is "broken," lawmakers promoting a restrictionist agenda have aggressively sought to enact a range of punitive policies aimed at disrupting everyday life for unauthorized immigrants. They have been able to do so by exploiting vague generalizations concerning the "broken immigration system"--an abstraction around which a (false) consensus has formed. For when people agree to the proposition that the system is broken, they often mean very different things. Some favor a broad legalization program that grants amnesty to undocumented immigrants, while others openly call for stiffer border enforcement and harsher penalties for unauthorized migration. Ironically, there is a crude functionality between the narratives of state failure and systemic breakdown on the one hand, and the upsurge of increasingly punitive anti-immigrant policy-making on the other, which has led Alicia Schmidt Camacho (2010: 5) to question rhetorically, What is the political and social logic that allows state failure to be universally acknowledged and yet to persist? The "brokenness" of the system has installed a peculiar ... form of governmentality based in failure. The disorder of immigration enforcement has a particular functionality for the U.S. government and its institutions of punishment, a functionality that the discourse of failure conveniently masks. The exclusion of migrants from the protected spaces of citizenship and legal personhood has become not the means to an end, resolving the status of the undocumented, but an end in itself. By treating unauthorized migrants as threats to national security, U.S. law enforcement agents have colluded in separating migrants as a distinct class of subjects, divested of the normal protections and rights accorded to other members of society. Marked by the taint of illegality and divested of the protections that attend citizenship, unauthorized immigrants find themselves legally excluded from the society to which they contribute, within which they reside, and of which they are a part. In a move designed to banish unauthorized immigrants from the U.S. national territory and its subnational jurisdictions, lawmakers promoting a restrictionist agenda have shifted their focus from national-level policymaking to state and local arenas in the wake of their failed attempts to overhaul the U.S. immigration system in 2005,2006, and 2008. Backed by nativist activists and paleoconservative policy think tanks, restrictionists have crafted state and local "illegal immigrant relief acts" that criminalize the presence of unauthorized immigrants in a jurisdiction and call on local law enforcement authorities to engage in direct or indirect enforcement of immigration laws (Rodriguez, 2008). …