Borders, Boundaries and Who Belongs

Who Goes Here and There?

As the new administration dives into mass deportation of “illegals” with both feet, I remember that undocumented Hispanic workers rebuilt New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina’s devastation (2005).  And that “Dreamers,” brought here as children, and now American in every way except the crucial matter of citizenship, could be sent back to countries some may never even have visited (Jim Carlton. ‘Dreamers’ Make Emergency Plans as Trump Vows to Deport Millions. Wall Street Journal. Dec. 24, 2024). But acknowledging contributions and aspirations clearly doesn’t fit current narratives.

Family History

My feeling for edges and borders began early, noticing slight differences in ways folks did things across the random states and locations we visited on our summer baseball treks. We only ventured outside this country to Canada twice—Toronto when I was under 1½ and then, when I was 8, to Quebec and another language and culture.  But the following year, I recall riding with my dad on booze “runs” from the dry Texas county where we perched one summer to a wet Oklahoma county, across the Red River, barely a trickle that year, though it would flood the next. Just off the bridge, on both sides of the road, flimsy booths had hatch, swing-up, windows. The structures resembled concession stands at ballparks, but even that young, I understood I was witnessing a different kind of drive-thru exchange. One side could feel legally/morally virtuous and upright (uptight?), while depending on the other side to provide a safety valve to release human frailties and “vices.”

Borders and Boundaries

Borders, even those that appear geographically obvious, are always human creations, matters of negotiation, dispute and the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. Though policed and defended, borders can shapeshift, through war, colonial conquest, eventual “liberation.”  Ever since it spanned the continent, the US has had a convenient ocean to either side, a perfect fit for historic American exceptionalism and isolation now making a comeback.  But as climate change accelerates, even those edges are frangible, receding and eaten into by coastal erosion. Land borders to north and south have been more ambiguous, subject to negotiation and sometimes aggression. Canada may appear simple:  I have a picture, pinned to my bulletin board, of a mural from Buffalo’s City Hall: “Frontiers Unfettered by Any Frowning Fortresses.” Nice alliteration, but not historically accurate. The British burned an earlier village of Buffalo. The US tried invading the other way during the War of 1812 but was repulsed. Canada maintained border fortresses until around our Civil War, when we were presumably too busy to threaten. Disputes with Britain flared again in the northwest, defining the upper limits of what’s now Washington State (originally part of the Louisiana Purchase). The southern edge is far more complex. There’s the history:  much of the now southwest US was taken, via the Mexican War, with the US legal system then deployed to expropriate land, water, other rights and resources, and political power from conquered Mexican-origin populations. And then there are the ethnic and cultural differences. So, “The border between [the two countries as] cultural formations is…not arbitrary and artificial (wherever it finally was delineated, geographically…) …[view] borderlands as a colliding ground of two major sociocultural formations.” (Josiah McC. Heyman. Culture Theory and the US-Mexico Border.) [Note: this and other sources, indicated by **, are from Thomas M. Wilson and Hastings Donnan, editors.  A Companion to Border Studies. Wiley Blackwell. C2012).

What Does an American Look Like?

What, with growing ethnic diversity, does an American look like these days? Certainly, we’re a lot less “white” than we once were. Hard, being a nation of immigrants, to claim ethnic purity, though white supremacists certainly try. Black, brown and mixed-race folks’ status/standing remains complicated by our domestic caste system, so embedded we take it in like the air we breathe. Though “an artificial construction, [it sets] a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups on the basis of ancestry.” (Isabel Wilkerson. Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.  Random House. C2020). Forget any melting pot notions. NPR interviewed a group of professional Arabic-heritage women, raised here, who had expected/hoped to gradually be accepted as American in their generation, but now see their children face the same challenges. And violence can sometimes flare at disjointed, jagged, edges of discomfort, resentment, mental illness. Black shoppers at a Buffalo supermarket, typically here for generations, were killed for being who they are. Vietnamese women working in nail salons in Atlanta were killed for being who they are, for being here (where they don’t belong?!), and because the perpetrator couldn’t get a date(?).

Border Myths and Realities

There are an estimated 11M undocumented persons within this country’s borders. Difficult, of course, to be more precise, the whole point being to avoid official detection. About 72-76% are Hispanic (from Mexico and south), here to work and send money back to their families. Many bring their families with them. They make key contributions in our agriculture, food processing, supply chain, and construction sectors. The vast majority are law abiding and, it’s often said, take on jobs Americans don’t want to do. Tax ID data show they paid $59.4B in federal and $13.6B in state and local taxes in 2022 and sent some $81B back to relatives. Yet they carry negative stereotypes—criminal activity, drug trafficking, violent street gangs, sucking down benefits they’re not entitled to.  Only takes a few examples to “prove,” since the very idea of the “illegal” has morphed into “a thing-in-itself, reified, fetishized, as the deliberate acts of a spectacular mass of sundry violators of the law, rather than what it really is, a transnational social relation of labor and capital…” (**Nicholas De Genova. Border, Scene and Obscene).

Border Enforcement

Was the first week’s seemingly endless cascade of Executive Orders a rush to deliver on promises to the base within the short post-inauguration “honeymoon” (Alex Leary and Meredith McGraw. Why Donald Trump Is Racing So Fast to Remake America. Wall Street Journal. Jan. 24, 2025). Was the chaos meant to confuse and overwhelm any opposition? Probably both, but legal analysts say, despite four years in the conservative policy pipeline, many orders are poorly crafted and short on valid legal bases.  A federal judge put a stay on the attempt to revoke birthright citizenship of children born here to non-citizens, calling in clearly unconstitutional and ineptly argued. So far though, immigration agents have been authorized to raid previously off-limits “sanctuary” spaces (Alicia A. Caldwell and Max Rivera. NYC to LA Brace for Deportations as Trump Lets Immigration Agents Raid Churches. Bloomberg. Jan. 25, 2025). The Justice Department announced intent to pursue legal action against local officials of Sanctuary Cities, if they impede or obstruct deportation. In California, the Border Patrol conducted racially profiled traffic stops, scooping up undocumented farm day laborers, as well as naturalized citizens. (Michael Hiltzik. Column: Inside the Bakersfield raids that showed how Trump’s immigration policies will sow chaos. Los Angeles Times. Jan. 22, 2025). Immigration and Customs agents without a warrant raided a NJ business, arresting both undocumented and citizens, including one who’s a veteran. (Steve Strunsky. Newark Mayor: ICE raided business without a warrant, detained US citizens. NJ.com. Jan. 23, 2025; David Lopez. Trump’s attempt to bust up communities deserves moral blowback. NJ.com Opinion. Jan. 26, 2025). And we’ve seen the first visual of a line of detainees, in shackles, being loaded onto a military plane.

Human Factors

Important to remember that actions/raids are always “encounters between persons.” And that those on the receiving end are real people who suffer genuine fear, anxiety, trauma, with their already precarious lives further upended. Treating them as objects and “means to an end” is reflected in ways policies are carried out on the ground, where agents’ actions are “often a function of the enactment, effective or not, of scripts and routines that satisfy narrative expectations and categories…of authority and control.” (**David B. Coplan. Border Show Business and Performing States). The title of the California operation, “Return to Sender,” sends a cavalier and mean-spirited message, casting hard-working, law-abiding, non-citizens as criminals.  In the California raids, one citizen’s video of an agent during slashing his tires (in the heat of the moment?) went viral. (Hiltzik).  That has me thinking about some folks who might find their ways into such jobs. I remember the old Kuder Preference Test of possible vocational choices. Could there be high percentage of certain personality types—macho, cowboy, highly physical—like those often featured in cop shows? And I think of Waco and Drug Enforcement agents and how frustration led to overreach that eventually emerged in the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building. I’ve been there and walked through the monument of stone (concrete?) chairs, full-sized for adults, heartbreakingly small for babies and toddlers killed in the building’s day care center. Proof that violence and trauma never just fade away: they carry consequences, can haunt and reverberate and come around in other places and at other times and sometimes strike the most innocent.

Border Messaging

While retro nationalism may represent strategic border theater, it lags global realities, rapidly morphing more toward “trans-state networks…across boundaries,” and a “transnational social relation of labor and capital.” But even as “national politics become a melodramatic sideshow…states initiate countervailing (and largely unavailing) appeals to economic nationalism and the performance of borders, including re-bordering by coercive means.” And “…Claims to status through such identities are legitimated through stories, and the passionate senses of self that are forged, recreated, and contested…” (**Coplan).  Does underlying insecurity also help explain 19^th century mode neo-Manifest Destiny/gunboat diplomacy proposals to expand borders—invading Canada, annexing Greenland, taking back the Panama Canal, renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America—to assert greater control?  Or are these just “symbolic culture-war measures of vague declarations of intent?” (Jonathan Chait. Trump’s Second Term Might Have Already Peaked. The Atlantic. Jan. 22, 2025.). And then there’s the question of where to send non-Mexican deportees.  Mexico and the Bahamas have said no. Inquiries were also put to Panama, Grenada, Turks and Caicos, but all refused.  A deal is plan is being worked out with El Salvador, based on personal relationships between the presidents. (Trump Zeroes in on Country to Dump Migrants From All Over. Daily Beast. Jan. 26,2025).

Signifying Moments

As I finished this piece, Inauguration Day converged with official celebration of Martin Luther King Day, a whole other story.  Frigid weather forced the ceremony inside, but despite heavy input by tech billionaires, no jumbotrons were provided for MAGA faithful left out in the cold to watch.  Flags at half-mast to honor President Carter’s passing were apparently raised and then lowered afterward. In Vermont, of all places, a border agent was shot and killed by an “illegal.”  The outgoing president had earlier warned against the ascendancy of the money elites. So, we have a whole bunch of signifying going on at once. And take as given that Tower-of-Babel social media and combat-heavy macho computer games have been major factors in forming what the current populist, nativist, vibe, aka the fancier German Zeitgeist (“spirit of the age”)—what’s happening culturally, religiously, intellectually. Speaking of personal relations, those same tech oligarchs, arguably architects of the age, and erstwhile nerds, are now buying their way onto the macho MAGA train. (Rebecca Shaw. I knew one day I’d have to watch powerful men burn the world down—I just didn’t expect them to be such losers. The Guardian. Jan. 16, 2025).  So, META (Face Book and Instagram) will follow Musk’s Twitter/X in removing fact-checking in favor of “Community Notes” and ditching all Diversity Equity and Inclusion programs. That will make it harder to tell what’s going on. But not impossible: other sources will take up fact-checking tasks as needed.  Take genuine gamers’ debunking of Musk’s claims he hit the top level of one game.

Other Voices, Other Narratives

There’s a “don’t confuse me with facts”—or the Constitution –tone to all this.  And we can expect a four-year tsunami of lawsuits, countersuits, and counter-countersuits, with the ACLU, United Farm Workers, states, cities, etc. in real legal battle rather than virtual/video combat. Meanwhile, there will be stories and counter stories; times like these do generate a whole bunch of content. Storytelling is the most human of superpower, which can travel over, under, around, and through boundaries. A friend keeps saying, “You can’t make this stuff up.” But in these over-the-top-times, we don’t have to. Comedians and late-night talk show hosts have already begun. And there’ll be plenty to lampoon, embroider, as with the silly invasion scenarios, ripe for borrowing and adapting using genres such as Latin American Magical Realism, a la writers like Jorge Luis Borges (A Thousand Years of Solitude) that mix reality and fantasy, folktales, myth. Similar scenarios played out in the former Soviet Union. A common pattern under dictatorships or regimes trying to act that way. Using spoof and satire and flights of fancy to tell the truth slant made it possible to survive and continue the narrative. And, in these litigious times, it might also help avoid revenge lawsuits that seek to gag and stifle.  Over time, I believe telling our own human and humane stories can help heal the “enormous harm to the soul of this nation” currently being done….. “and allow us to consider less hateful [and realistic] solutions.” (Lopez).  Amen.