The Sport of Gun Throwing

If you thought the problem was xenophobic (or opportunist) legislators in Arizona, the past few days in US Senate, Congress and Department of Homeland Security should shift the attention back to DC and the feds, where the money for border militarization and criminalization comes from, and where Democrats' and Republicans' election year calculus will give law-and-order xenophobes everything they want. 

Democrats have mastered the sport of gun throwing and wall building.  The tools are blunt and involve lots of violence workers.  The only fine art is in perception management.  Will the great New York Senator Schumer be able to maintain his image as the Democratic leader on Comprehensive Immigration Reform after getting a $600 million border violence bill passed in the Senate last Friday? 

The House followed suit on Tuesday, and the bill now returns to Senate before being sent to the president for his signature.  The bills include funding for two more drones and 1500 additonal border agents.  Ironically, the costs will be passed on to human resources companies that recruit "skilled" workers to the US on H1-B visas.  The increased exploitation of one set of workers will be used to increase the capacity for violence in the US Southwest.  India has already complained that this fee would discriminate against Indian workers. 

If these bills weren't enough, Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced that all of the counties that border Mexico are now enrolled in the Secure Communities program, which basically turns the jail system into a dragnet.  Under the program, jails collaborate with ICE by passing them identification information from people who are simply booked into the jail.  ICE can then issue a detainer.  Abuses of the program are well documented; in Travis County, Texas, the program led to a dramatic increase in pretextual traffic stops.  When I visited Nogales, I met one man who was deported from Arizona for failing to use his turn signal long enough, and CopWatch-Migra Patrol in Tucson captured the everyday collaboration between local police and Border Patrol or ICE.  Whether the collaboration is on the pretext of checking identification or calling for translation help, that happens in communities all across the country. 

These everyday stops are the banal, mundane workings of a deportation system that is responsible for disrupting millions of people's lives, families, and communities.  The idea that the rights of migrants (and folks who might be migrants) can be respected within such a legislative context and with the backing of thousands of gun-carrying law enforcement agents, a border wall that siphons money and deposits blood, and tens of thousands of cages is part of the trick that Democrats are trying to pull off (the GOP doesn't seem to bother with dissimulation). 

Throwing lots more guns at a conflict and building fortifications are usually signs of a war, but this is not the primary way that most people in the US understand current police and border policies.  Who's fighting this war, who's the enemy, how are people explicitly and tacitly supporting it?  The simultaneous spectacle and banality of state violence is part of what's confusing about being able to recognize a conflict zone for what it is.  It's also fundamentally confusing to imagine that "immigration enforcement" is anything other than violent or that this violence can be reconciled with rights, much less freedom.