Externalization of U.S.-Mexico Border: Obscuring Accountability and Implications for Migrants

By Amanda Kragt

Boundaries evolve along a series of dimensions; physical and symbolic, impermeable and porous. The US-Mexico border is not just a physical boundary, but is also experienced differently across time and space for different people. A migrant might encounter a tendril of the US-Mexico border when they are denied a US visa or when they are passing through Central America still hundreds of miles from the actual boundary.  Border externalization, or outsourcing of border control, is a phenomenon that has existed in the United States since the early 20th century when the first visa requirements started to be implemented.  Now remote-control practices such as the ‘offshoring’ of border checks, asylum processing, interdictions and migrant detention have expanded across the geopolitical map and increased in sophistication [1]. Interception and offshore “processing” of asylum claims began in the United States in the early 1980’s in response to the influx of Haitian and Cuban migration to the U.S. by sea.  After this immigration “crisis”, political anxieties over asylum started to rise. Thereafter, offshore practices became more extensively used around the world in the 1990’s and 2000’s [2] to prevent asylum seekers from ever arriving to the receiving country’s shores and invoking their legal right to asylum. 

Visa restrictions in the United States have also closely reflected rising concerns over asylum and have been used as a political tool alongside more traditional tools of coercive diplomacy such as sanctions [1]. Remote control practices seek to legally limit access to protection in host states for migrants fleeing violence, displacement, political persecution and other severe forms of insecurity. Remote control policies shift the burden of border control and management from the US to other nations, which obscures accountability for human rights abuses and masks how such policies ultimately help the U.S. pursue, manage and control its imperial interests. 

Border control practices have also been extended from the border to the U.S. interior. Especially since the 9/11/2001 attacks, immigration and customs enforcement practices have been ramped up.  Now there are a wide range of border externalization and internalization techniques that extend border control and management in all directions from the US-Mexico border.  Since 2001, for example, the Immigration Act created the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which has combined immigration functions with anti-terrorism coordination and new methods of identification and surveillance [1]. Methods of identification and surveillance have specifically targeted, and disproportionately profiled and policed, certain racial and ethnic identity groups in the United States [3]. Demographers Fix and Passel (1994) estimated that people of European and Asian backgrounds make up 24% of undocumented immigrants in the United States [4]. However, the top ten receiving countries (Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Dominican Republic, Brazil, Ecuador, Colombia, Nicaragua, and Jamaica) of deportees in 2010 accounted for 96% of deportees that year [5]. Not only have new methods of identification and surveillance equipped law enforcement institutions to selectively target undocumented immigrants based on race, the post 9/11 restructuring these institutions to combine anti-terrorism efforts with immigration enforcement has conflated two fundamentally different issues of U.S. national interest.

A number of migration scholars have studied the genesis and functions of the border externalization phenomenon as it relates to the United States and the rest of the world. Todd Miller discusses this in terms of border imperialism by drawing on the work of Justin Campbell at the University of Arizona to describe border externalization practices as “border sets” [6]. Border sets refer to border resources and training extending down from the US-Mexico border through a “layered approach”, or “layers of borders”, all the way down to the Darién Gap between Panama and Venezuela.  This entire area and the Caribbean are referred to as the “third border” because of how the area serves to deter migrants from reaching US territory [7]. Since 9/11, the US and Mexico have bolstered their security collaboration substantially through programs such as the Smart Borders Initiative (2002), The Mérida Initiative (2008), and Programa Frontera Sur (PFS- 2014).  The Smart Borders Initiative (or the U.S.-Mexico Border Partnership Action Plan) for example, included infrastructure and security designed specifically to control migratory flows from south of Mexico. Mexico implemented Programa Frontera Sur in coordination with U.S. support in 2014 to increase checkpoints and immigrant deterrence in southern Mexico. Migrants who are fleeing various forms of insecurity in their home countries encounter various forms of these border externalization mechanisms, which obstruct their physical and legal pathways to protection in sending, transit and receiving countries. These approaches therefore limit options for immigration policy makers in transit countries such as Mexico.

Mexico has historically been a sending country (its citizens migrating to the U.S. at least seasonally for labor purposes), but in recent years has increasingly become a transit country (one that migrants pass through on their way to their country of destination), and a receiving country (one where migrants decide to stay and take residence).  As the United States and Mexico increase security collaboration designed to obstruct physical and legal pathways for migrants, the burden of immigration enforcement is shifted from the U.S. to Mexico.  This increases migrant vulnerability in Mexico due to inadequate funding, infrastructure and low institutional capacity to effectively manage immigration enforcement.  Programs, like the ones mentioned above, are a few examples of how the United States has taken this outsourced, layered approach to immigration enforcement and used them to prevent migrants from reaching its border.

Proposals to designate Mexico as a “Safe Third Country” for asylum seekers exemplifies the outsourcing of immigration enforcement. This policy would require asylum seekers transiting Mexico to first apply for asylum there, instead of in the U.S.  In effect, the policy would aim to decrease migration across the US-Mexico border, enabling US border patrol to turn asylum seekers away regardless of the circumstances of their cases. It would also shift the burden of processing and adjudicating asylum cases, (and subsequent deportation proceedings) from the United States to Mexico.  In January 2019, the U.S. government implemented Migrant Protection Protocols, whereby individuals seeking admission to the United States from Mexico without proper documentation, may be returned to Mexico to wait for the duration of their immigration proceedings [8]. When migrants are turned away at the US-Mexico border, many are forced to sleep in the open on bridges or in areas around their entrance in the northern Mexico border region where they are vulnerable to the high levels of death, violence and criminal exploitation that characterize the region [9].  In 2017, Mexico recorded the highest number of homicides, 29,168, since records began in 1997, even higher than the peak of the open drug-war violence of 2011 [10]. Meanwhile, lack of capacity and infrastructure limit Mexico from successfully carrying out the agreement; it also raises concerns for migrant rights and accessibility to the asylum process. Migrants have the right to claim asylum under international law but have very little access to do so. Mexico only accepted 30% of asylum applications in 2017, and in large part due to understaffing and underfunding, Mexico’s refugee agency COMAR has only 3 offices in the country which were only able to decide 30% of cases received in 2016 [11]. Due to lack of access to the asylum process, the application rate of migrants in Mexico is a remarkably low 1.6%, [12] while abuses against migrants have increased in southern border states due to increased militarization and deterrence methods implemented through Programa Frontera Sur (PFS) [13]. In Mexico, impunity rates for perpetrators of crimes against migrants are extremely high while low asylum application rates reflect lack of access to justice and information, poor detention conditions, and deportation prior to their right to apply for asylum or receiving humanitarian protection [11]. As Cecilia Menjívar argues, “The irregular status of these trans-migrants and the increased enforcement and policing in transit countries have made them increasingly vulnerable to extortion, robbery, rape and even murder” [14]. Evidence does not support Mexico as a “safe third country” for these reasons and exemplifies how border externalization increases migrant vulnerability, shifts border enforcement to Mexico, deflects US responsibility under international law towards asylum seekers, and increases human rights concerns.

Miller argues that forms of “border imperialism” and externalization are visible all over the world, surfacing wherever the US has different political, economic or military interests [6]. U.S. federal funding on ‘anti-smuggling’ or ‘counterterrorism’ efforts are often targeted to strengthening border security capacity and infrastructure in countries where the U.S. holds other strategic interests, which enables policy leverage. Kenya, for example, is a major U.S. trade hub in Africa where substantial amounts of U.S. federal funding are spent on ‘counterterrorism’ efforts.  Part of the counterterrorism funding is used to bolster the Kenyan border security apparatus, which did not exist prior to receiving counterterrorism funding from the U.S. in 2009 [7]. Due to the United States’ fundamental role in strengthening border security regimes in Kenya, and around the world, it obscures how these security regimes ultimately serve to police and control U.S. economic and political interests in those regions. 

After the Cold War and since the 2000’s, externalizing border management has ramped up as a technique for managing domestic public anxieties regarding immigration, while deflecting the issue from domestic visibility [1]. Public outcry for politically unpopular and unethical policies such as child separation at the border or blocking migrants’ legal right to apply for asylum may be a few of the underlying reasons why the U.S. has shifted the burden of such policies abroad. Immigration enforcement policies and asylum claims on U.S. soil are also expensive due to their financial, political, and bureaucratic costs throughout implementation, processing and removal proceedings when asylum or other protected statuses are denied [2]. Politically popular, border externalization policies draw on narratives of an immigration “crisis” and racialized stereotypes of immigrants to justify how border security should be managed and controlled. These narratives invoke fear and increased support for zero-tolerance immigration policies and a securitized stance toward the US-Mexico border. However, hardline, securitized approaches to migration and border control do not manage or control migration, but instead contribute directly to increasing the risks of migration alongside human rights concerns.

Policies, practices, and diplomacy used to achieve this transnational nature of the U.S.-Mexico boundary have led to increased militarization and securitization of the immigration enforcement apparatus across the region and corresponding human rights violations. Immigration policy is often exported from the United States to Latin American transit countries, which replicate militarization and securitization models that enhance risks for migrants.  Border control also takes place through the internalization of border controls, whereby border policing strategies and logics are applied to the interior [14] , [3].  More people who already lived in the United States were deported in fiscal year 2017 compared with 2016, another sign of internalization of the US’s southwest boarder ramping up since the inauguration of the Trump administration [15].  Examples of internalized border control policies in the United States include the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986, and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA), and the “Secure Communities” immigration policing program which contributed to “mass deportation, insidious policing, mass detention of immigrants, racial anxieties about immigrants cum Latinos, militarization and ‘thickening of the border’” [3]. The racialized gaze of the border is not just isolated at the border, but has turned inward and radiated externally. Meanwhile, the technology and militarization at the physical U.S.-Mexico boundary is also being adopted in Latin American countries. The Defense Department announced January 29, 2019 it will send 2,000 more active duty troops to the border to join the already 2,400 already there, reports the New York Times [16]. Militarization of border enforcement increases migrant vulnerability and risk of death. If this is the approach the U.S. takes for a “war-like” U.S.-Mexico border zone, then we can expect to see an increase in human rights violations for migrants at home and abroad. 

Externalizing and internalizing immigration enforcement through “thickening of the border” [3] and remote-control practices have extended how the US-Mexico boundary is experienced across time and space.  These policies are one way the United States obscures accountability and manages domestic audiences’ expectations with respect to immigration enforcement while displacing the visibility of its effects.  Ultimately, the racialized nature of externalization practices of U.S. Mexico border control and the export of ineffective U.S. zero tolerance migration policy to Mexico and beyond, leads to subsequent militarization and increased dangerous conditions and abuses against migrants.   
 

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