Permeable Borders: History, Theory, Policy, and Practice in the United States

By Paul Otto

If the frontier, in all its boundless possibility, was a central organizing metaphor for much of U.S. history, today it is arguably the border that best encapsulates the American experience, as xenophobia, economic inequality, and resurgent nationalism continue to fuel conditions of division and limitation. This boldly interdisciplinary volume explores the ways that historical and contemporary actors in the U.S. have crossed such borders—whether national, cultural, ethnic, racial, or conceptual. Together, these essays suggest new ways to understand borders while encouraging connection and exchange, even as social and political forces continue to try to draw lines around and between people.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Release date: Apr 9, 2020
• ISBN: 9781789204438

Book preview

Introduction

Paul Otto and Susanne Berthier-Foglar

Since we first envisioned this collection of essays, the United States elected a new president, Donald Trump, and the issues related to migration and borders took on far greater salience. Trump’s America first campaign, which emphasized a secure American border, among other things, helped put him in the White House in 2017. By late 2018, the wall he proposed to build along the southern US border had become a centerpiece of President Trump’s agenda. Just before the 2018 winter holidays, he staked all his political clout on a battle with Congress, forcing a shutdown of a significant portion of the government (ironically threatening weakened border control because of the withholding of government funds) while he demanded $5.6 billion to build a wall to create an absolute separation between the United States and Mexico. In one of his innumerable tweets, the president proclaimed, People want to stop drugs and criminals at the Border. Want Border Security! . . . The wait is costly and dangerous! (Trump 2019). Meanwhile, immigration issues have also drawn the focused attention of the president. Not content to address the issue of illegal or undocumented immigration, in August 2019 he announced changes to the application of the public charge law that would prevent the authorized immigration of any individual who might qualify for minimal social services, and those already legally residing in the United States and utilizing such services might be prevented from advancing toward full citizenship. Symbolic of this attitude, Ken Cuccinell, acting director of US Citizenship and Immigration Services, suggested on 13 August 2019 that the Statue of Liberty’s epitaph, long a symbol of hope and promise to would-be immigrants to the United States, would be better worded, Give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet and who will not become a public charge (quoted in Itkowitz and Sonmez 2019).

Unsurprisingly, many of our authors introduce their essays with reference to Trump or to his policies. But the currency of the border and immigration issues that helped fuel a presidential campaign and guide his administration should not obscure the fact that Americans have long been preoccupied with questions of national borders and migration across and within them. Nor have discussions of migration and borders been limited to national political boundaries. The American story has always included the experience of crossing or challenging cultural borders, questioning the existence of lines dividing ethnicities, genders, and religious groups, transgressing aesthetic and intellectual boundaries, and defying regulations or customs demarcating proper behavior.

This volume brings together essays that explore permeability or liminality of American borders.¹ Many of these are case studies in how individuals or groups crossed geographic borders, but as will become abundantly clear, the concept of permeability is ripe with possibilities for exploring and better understanding the role of all sorts of borders in the United States today and in years, decades, and centuries past. Our authors explore the crossing of national borders, the creation of notional borders, the transgressing of aesthetic expectations and traditions, the challenging of racially based policies, the adoption of virtual borders to extend ethnic identity beyond former geographic boundaries, the blurring of policy divisions and the conflating of immigration and criminal law, the flow of economic, social, and cultural relationships despite heightened security concerns, the continuities and discontinuities across national borders, and the creation of imaginaries that uphold outmoded border structures or that embrace new global realities. We have grouped these essays under three categories: Historical Border Crossing: National, Ethnic, and Theoretical, Permeability in Border and Migration Policy, and National Borders, Liminal Spaces, and Permeation. While wide ranging in disciplinary approach, in scope and content, and in definition of borders, all of the chapters bring greater understanding to the permeability of borders in and surrounding the United States.

What do we mean by permeable borders? In the first place, we are challenging the popular idea that borders are necessarily impassable, that boundaries should represent obstacles. Indeed, while the public perception may be that a border, by definition, is or should be a barrier, there is nothing in the definition of either border or boundary to imply such a thing. They are edges, margins, frontiers, demarcations of particular spaces or regions. They are not impenetrable nor unbridgeable; they are permeable. So to focus attention on permeable borders is to begin with a reminder that borders can be, and maybe should be, crossed.

The borders in our study must be understood broadly. As alluded to at the beginning of this introduction, much of the public American discourse at the time of this writing is on national borders, how secure (that is, impassable) they should be, and who has the right to cross them. But our multidisciplinary volume pushes readers to consider all kinds of borders. Boundaries between nations draw the attention of several of our contributors, but the essays included here take us to conceptual, intellectual, and aesthetic divides. They explore the ways people—by social classes, or by ethnic groups, or as political actors, or of other possible categorization—can be grouped together or separated from one another. They compare geographic boundaries to virtual boundaries. They consider divisions between those people defined as worthy and those defined as unworthy, and what makes it so. Sometimes they help us see borders where we had not perceived them before.

So, too, do the essays here help us see the breadth of permeability. Is it traversing a national boundary? Is it transgressing a cultural ideal or practice? Is it the definition of borders themselves that is permeable? How is a border defined? Who defines it? To what purpose is the symbol of a border put? Does permeability mean more than just moving through or across borders, perhaps also moving borders themselves? The essays in this volume raise and answer these and other thought-provoking questions.

Historical Border Crossing: National, Ethnic, and Theoretical

Five historical case studies, ranging from the founding of the nation to nearly the present day, comprise part 1. Historian Roger L. Nichols leads off the work exploring Native American transgressions of the border with Canada in pursuit of various interests. Beginning in the 1780s, and for a hundred years following, Native American groups crossed the northern US border to find new lands to call their own, to gain access to British support and encouragement, or to flee from American military offensives. On the one hand, native motivations can be understood in terms of the British threat to American sovereignty, since Native Americans found inspiration in their border crossings from earlier established relations with British traders or military leaders. But it should not be forgotten that Native American groups were sovereign in their own right, often recognized as such by the US government, which signed treaties with them. Further, the practical reality of America’s borders in the nineteenth century is that they were more conceptual than real. Yes, maps were drawn and boundaries surveyed, but there were no effective fences or border guards, nor any effort as we would understand it today to control the border. Native people themselves clearly did not accept the imposition of national boundaries even when they acknowledged their existence by embracing the benefit of crossing them.

In the first case Nichols recounts, Joseph Brant and the Mohawks, faced with the threat of US hegemony to their sovereignty, sought new homes in Quebec following the American Revolution, taking up the British on their earlier promises of support and aid. Confronted with the prospect of forced removal after passage of the 1830 Indian Removal Act, the Potawatomi similarly migrated from parts of Michigan, Illinois, and Wisconsin to an uncertain welcome in Canada. During the same decades, other tribes traversed the border seeking British support and military aid (and the British sometimes entered US territory to provide it). Finally, in the second half of the nineteenth century, different bands of the Sioux—one led by the famous Sitting Bull—and some of the Nez Perce found temporary refuge in Canada from the US military. Thus, with mixed results, for over a century Native Americans used the international border to gain options that they lacked without it.

Using a starting point in the nineteenth century, this time in the West, particularly California, interdisciplinary scholar Jeffrey Swartwood, in chapter 2, brings a much more theoretical approach to America’s borders, challenging the Manifest Destiny perspective perpetuated by many contemporaries and by historians since, whether they embraced or abhorred the ideology. For Nichols, the existence and location of the national border is essentially undisputed; the degree to which it formed a boundary, however, is demonstrated to be insignificant when the sovereignty of Native Americans was challenged. Looking first at the US-Mexico border, Swartwood explores a crossing of Anglo-Americans from the United States to Mexico, a crossing in which they apparently shed their national and even cultural identity to integrate with Mexican society. But at the transition of California from Mexican to American territory, Swartwood observes such people moving back into an American identity. What he reveals is not the straightforward story of Manifest Destiny that is often told, but the story of a kind of conceptual (and unintended) ability to move the US border with Mexico in order to conquer new territory. As Swartwood puts it, The early settlers and soldiers, in this narrative, may have technically crossed an international boundary upon leaving the United States, but they perhaps in no meaningful way crossed a collective national cultural boundary as they were, in a sense, trespassing on land that was already notionally, if not yet legally, theirs.

Swartwood highlights the examples of several individuals, but his focus on settlers is of particular concern here. None of the three exemplars of American immigration to Mexican California seem particularly driven by the creed of Manifest Destiny, nor espouse in their words or actions an expansionistic American nationalism. They represent, in fact, a counternarrative. But despite having integrated into the Spanish-Mexican culture of California before its conquest, they are welcomed back into the national fold. Such a situation reveals a porosity and a flexibility that is both notional and pragmatic. . . . it reveals that the social borders, like the national territorial borders, were porous constructs that could be bent to the perceived needs of a given context. But while these Americans were crossing national borders, Swartwood avers, they were ultimately not leaving behind something essential of being American. Swartwood’s essay reveals the nuances of this situation far better than can be readily done in this introduction. But a key element of the argument is his revelation that the pursuit of the American dream challenges the national borders themselves. This can be seen nowhere better than in the iconic western protagonists of twentieth-century popular culture who seek a more profoundly traditional ‘American experience’ south of the border in Mexico, where some retired Americans who have moved to Mexico in recent years feel a lot freer there than in the United States. The implications are significant. As some Americans contemplate a less porous and more impenetrable border that has been closed to unwanted ingression, will they also find themselves deprived of the possibility to egress?

While Swartwood helps us see ways that people notionally crossed and extended physical national borders, dance and fine arts historian Claudie Servian examines Americans whose border crossing was entirely notional. In chapter 3, ‘Dare to Dance Your Own Dance’: Transgressing Aesthetic Borders in Early Twentieth-Century American Theatrical Dance, she describes how prominent American choreographies both crossed and broke, or transgressed, aesthetic borders in creating a new, and American, form of choreography. Loïe Fuller, Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis, and Ted Shawn all found ways of throwing off the shackles of dance forms imposed on them by European traditions, such as traditional European ballet. Contravening such expectations was a way of crossing borders that violated the long-respected and held-to practices of choreography. In looking for new dance forms, these artists then crossed borders again, both national and chronological, seeking inspiration from beyond the United States in ancient Greece, India, and Egypt. In doing so, Servian draws on the work of scholar Homi Bhabha, who talks of the borderline work of culture. Art created in this way does not merely recall the past as aesthetic precedent; it renews the past, refiguring it as a contingent ‘in-between’ space, that innovates and interrupts the performance of the present.

Using this process of hybridization, these early twentieth-century American choreographers were able to create something new. Yes, the old forms, especially from Europe, had been stifling, but by allowing themselves to adjust old forms in ways that introduced other national and cultural aesthetic expressions, they could create something that had not been seen before. Fuller, Duncan, and St. Denis blended emotion and movement in their dance composition and sought a closer relationship between nature and movement in dance. They looked for universal values in dance, eclectically and syncretically bringing together disparate forms and movements that led to new forms in their wake.

Servian shows us, then, that this was an expression of American nationalism itself: A revolutionary American dance was born. Seeing themselves as creating forms unique to the American experience—indeed, seeing that American dance must be its own thing and not simply a continuation of forms brought from Europe—these artists were exhibiting an aesthetic form of American exceptionalism, even as other, nativist, Americans sought to define their nationalism from a stance of anti-immigration. The spirit of the early twentieth-century choreographic art, writes Servian, was born thanks to American dancers breaking old habits, setting out far from known paths, and pioneering, inventing, discovering, and combining novelty and change.

In chapter 4, historian Heather Fryer takes us to a little-known part of a well-known story—the migration of a group of Japanese internees from the Manzanar Relocation Camp in Owens Valley, California, to Omaha, Nebraska. This internal migration was only possible because several Catholic priests, government employees opposed to relocation, and the incarcerated Japanese themselves played indispensable roles in the border work that made the government’s wartime racial boundaries permeable enough to channel a significant migration stream to Omaha. Like Servian, Fryer draws on the scholarship of Homi Bhabha to employ the concept of border work, the work undertaken by these various actors to challenge the race-based incarceration of Japanese Americans. Following Bhabha, Fryer sees borders as interstitial zones of productive encounter between state and society. So, borders are really borderlands where selves and societies are asserted, contested, negotiated, and creatively invented (or reinvented). Borders only become barriers when the collective actions of the various players make it so. Conversely, a border is permeable to the extent to which people can work a way around it, or through it, or can convince enough people that the border does not serve its intended purpose.

New borders were created when, through the War Relocation Authority (WRA), Japanese Americans on the West Coast were quickly rounded up after the attack on Pearl Harbor and confined to concentration camps throughout the West. But the WRA quickly saw that they had created a new problem due to the overcrowding, unrest, and unprecedented government dependency that the incarcerated Japanese Americans were now subjected to. Into this situation stepped the various border work actors identified by Fryer. Father Edward J. Flanagan, famous for his Boys Town orphanage outside Omaha, Nebraska, and also an opponent of racial division, first reached out offering housing and employment for fifty of the interned Japanese Americans to come to Boys Town as teachers, caretakers, and even counselors. Two other Catholic priests, both Maryknoll missionaries, also transcended racial divisions and American prejudices to aid imprisoned Japanese. Father Hugh Lavery served in the Japanese mission in Los Angeles for thirty years, while Father Leo Steinbach had been a missionary to Korea before being arrested by the Japanese after their invasion of that country. Both Lavery and Steinbach worked with Buddhists as well as Catholics, and when the relocation camp was established in Manzanar, both priests went there to serve the Japanese and help create a conduit with Father Flanagan fifteen hundred miles away for some of the Nikkei to move to Omaha. Government workers E. J. England and Caroline Trask, also uncomfortable with the racially based policy of Japanese internment, undertook small-scale bureaucratic steps to get some young men transferred from California to Omaha, while Japanese migrants to Omaha themselves, like Patrick Okura and his wife, facilitated the transfer of additional Japanese through hospitality and transition centers. Thus, this group of non-assimilationist priests, incarcerated racial outsiders, and softly dissenting government workers, through their resistance to the mass incarceration, provided the WRA the way out of its own predicament. Their work allowed the federal government to breach its own border by allowing structured and civilian-supervised resettlements . . . to take place in a manner that disrupted the logic of the militarized state in some respects, while conforming to it in others.

In chapter 5, American studies expert Marie-Christine Michaud examines the physical and virtual boundaries of New York City’s Italian and Italian American community. Once a prominent neighborhood in which generations of Italian immigrants passed from their native land into the United States, Little Italy provided a safe enclave in which to connect with fellow Italians while becoming integrated into American society. A distinct boundary could be observed between Little Italy and that of the neighboring communities, but it was a passable border that allowed passage in both directions. Over time, however, the successive generations of Italians chose the suburbs, leaving Little Italy for the outer boroughs. Attracted by more desirable housing and easier integration into mainstream American society, the Italian residents and property owners in Manhattan began selling and moving away. Meanwhile, other immigrant communities also emerged, particularly Chinatown. As Little Italy shrank, Chinatown grew, encroaching on the streets and blocks once teeming with Italian immigrants. In an area where those of Italian background once made up nine-tenths of the population, only one in twenty remain, and the visible evidence of Little Italy is not much more than a few restaurants. Saddened by this profound transformation, film director Martin Scorsese has observed that now that’s all Little Italy is, a façade.

But as Michaud demonstrates, the loss of Little Italy as a physical space has not meant the loss of Italian identity. Where geographic boundaries may have once been seen as necessary to protect, support, and encourage ethnic and cultural identity, Michaud argues that new technologies have taken the place of those old spatial markers. Italian Americans are now scattered through suburbia and no longer associated with a well-defined territory with circumscribed borders. But while those borders have so profoundly diminished, there exist still ethno-territories, as identified by Stéphane Dufoix and Valérie Foucher. Rather than having clearly delineated neighborhoods, the Italian Americans maintain connections through churches, schools, import stores, and restaurants. Little Italy continues to serve as a touchstone to ethnic identity, providing a locale for the suburbanized descendants of the old immigrants to join in festivals, eat at traditional Italian restaurants, and celebrate weddings and baptisms at the Most Precious Blood Church. But most importantly, it is through information and communication technologies (ICTs) that Italian Americans sustain their ethnic connections. Websites and social media connect Italian Americans with one another and with goods and services of traditional import to their community. Thus, the community no longer coheres through distinct geographic territories, but through virtual connections that facilitate education, ethnic associations, Italian (both in Italian and English) newspapers, and the continuation of various features of Italian American culture.

Permeability in Border and Migration Policy

While the authors in part 1 broaden our historical understanding of borders in the United States while exploring the various ways that such borders have been traversed, transcended, and transgressed, the authors of part 2 bring our attention to recent America, especially US policies—informed by neoliberal commitments—regarding the national border and migration to the United States. In chapter 6, communication scholar Jon Wiebel concentrates on the discourse of immigration policy and its intersection with welfare policy, two areas of public concern that ostensibly relate to separate populations. Although historical in setting, addressing the permeability of concerns in the 1996 congressional debates over the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act and the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, his essay has immediate and ongoing implications for US border policy. Realizing Government Ambitions: Policing Insiders and Outsiders draws on the work of Merav Nakar-Sadi to explore the ways that immigration and welfare policies, as worthiness regimes, intersected in the mid-1990s, particularly as members of Congress debated the worthiness and unworthiness of both documented and undocumented immigrants.

Wiebel draws particular attention to the discourse of entrepreneurialism, that is, discourses that privilege defining individuals as enterprising agents who take risks and make decisions based on a desire to improve their economic lives. In debates over immigration, members of the 104th Congress expressed their appreciation for (particularly undocumented) immigrants’ value as hard workers. In the first place, many representatives and senators recognized the difficulty of preventing unauthorized immigration because of the value of undocumented immigrants to the US economy, a jobs magnet that attracted worthy laborers. Second, their value as workers transcended what was seen as the criminality of their action in illegally entering the United States or overstaying their visas. In fact, some of the politicians shifted the blame for illegal immigration to the employers who willingly subverted government attempts to prevent illegal immigration, thus focusing primarily on the undocumented immigrants’ virtue in seeking employment and self-sufficiency.

The debates about immigration also involved debates about welfare. Often expressing neoliberal concerns, these deliberations raised the specter of illegal immigrants entering the United States and then exploiting and becoming dependent upon welfare programs. Clearly, this issue also related to the worthiness and unworthiness of individuals—the worthy being those who work hard and seek to support themselves, while the unworthy want nothing more than to have the government supply their needs. But in addition to the similarity of bifurcating both immigrant and resident populations into categories of enterprising and lazy, legislators blurred the lines between immigration policy and welfare policy. They sought to control abuses of the welfare system by limiting immigration to industrious and enterprising immigrants who would contribute to the economy rather than draw down government resources. To anyone following news of American politics as of early 2019, it is apparent that the lines between immigration and welfare policy continued to be blurred, as conservatives have abandoned their perception of illegal immigrants as enterprising individuals responding to the US work magnet, and now seek to build an impermeable wall along the southern US border. At the same time, immigration policy discourse connects welfare dependency with the status of documented immigrants and those seeking authorized entry into the United States

Whereas Wiebel demonstrates the blurred lines between immigration and welfare policy, in chapter 7 Marietta Messmer, originally trained in literary studies, brings our attention to the increasing interconnectedness between criminal law and immigration law, also stemming from neoliberal influences. Specifically, she argues that since 9/11 a profound change in immigration policy has taken place, only to be expanded upon by the Trump administration. This change consists of the outsourcing of migration management, which is expressed in the privatization of immigration control and detention and the employment of neighboring Mexico in the processing of asylum seekers and other migrants. This in turn has led to the circumvention of ‘basic human rights obligations.’ Seeking to make America’s borders less permeable, the US government has confused the boundaries between criminal and immigration law, has conflated the private sector and public sector in the exercise of government immigration policy, and has extended the legal border of the United States beyond the national border in ways reminiscent of the issues raised in chapter 2.

Much of this has taken place in the context of changes in immigration itself in recent years. Even though the number of undocumented entries through the southern US border has decreased, the national makeup of those entries has substantially shifted. In the last ten years, the number of Mexicans has decreased by about half, while the number of those from Central America, notably Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, has steadily increased, collectively exceeding the number of Mexicans in 2014 and 2016.

Since 1996 and the passing of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act discussed in chapter 6, undocumented entry into the United States has been criminalized, which in turn has led to the use of detention centers to deal with such transgressors of US immigration rules instead of deportation, as had been traditionally practiced. For example, nearly three-quarters of those imprisoned are held in private facilities run by for-profit companies. But even before reaching the US border and being detained, asylum seekers and others are being intercepted by Mexico and other Latin American nations. This stems from a policy instituted by President Bill Clinton that required government agencies to interdict and hold smuggled aliens as far as possible from the U.S. border and to repatriate them when appropriate. Under Operation Global Reach (1997), foreign governments have been enlisted to detain or help detain suspicious travelers. And since 9/11, Mexico has played a primary role in aiding US efforts at controlling and limiting immigration to the United States from Central America. The Southern Plan (2001) and the Southern Front Plan (2014) militarized Mexico’s southern border, placed responsibility for deportation of irregular Central American and other migrants on Mexico’s shoulders, and enlisted over five thousand Mexican police and members of the military to assist US immigration officers. And since Messmer completed her essay, Mexico and the United States reached a deal in June 2019 in which Mexico has agreed to increase border control enforcement and expand detention of asylum-seeking migrants across its territory. Blurring lines between public and private and extending the reach of US immigration actions beyond national borders, as well as enlisting other nations in those actions, have erased the distinction between migrants and criminals. Asylum seekers thus are seen by many as a threat to national security, and those detained under these new procedures and in private prisons are not protected in either civil rights or in human rights.

National Borders, Liminal Spaces, and Permeation

Our part 3 authors directly consider the ongoing permeability of the US borders with Mexico and Canada. In chapter 8, American studies scholar Cléa Fortuné focuses our attention on Douglas, Arizona, and Agua Prieta, Sonora. Sister cities facing one another across the US-Mexico border, these two cities represent both increased efforts at making the border impenetrable and ongoing cultural, economic, and familial ties and exchanges. Adopting Timothy J. Dunn’s broad definition of militarization as use of military rhetoric and ideology, as well as military tactics, strategy, technology, equipment, and forces, Fortuné argues that despite the [military-like] buildup at its border, Douglas still maintains its relationship with its Mexican sister city Agua Prieta, Sonora, Mexico.

Historically and culturally, Douglas has deep Mexican roots. First a Spanish colonial settlement and later a Mexican territory, the Douglas area was still in Mexican possession even after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), only becoming part of the United States after the Gadsden Purchase was ratified in 1854. It developed as a mining and railroad town; 80 percent of its residents are of Mexican origin. It wasn’t until the 1990s that a fence was first erected between the two cities—using Vietnam-era corrugated steel landing mats. Over the years, this barrier has been repaired, replaced, and upgraded. Meanwhile, radars, cameras, thermal imaging, and various electronic sensors have been added to detect and track unauthorized movement. Further, the fence has been doubled in some places and supplemented with a moat and barbed wire. Many of these security improvements have been made by military contractors with experience with the Israel-Palestine border. Finally, the number of armed border patrol agents has significantly increased, and agents have established extra-constitutional checkpoints on the interstate highway, many miles from the border.

Despite these aggressive efforts to monitor and control the border between Douglas and Agua Prieta, the history of the two cities demonstrates past and ongoing relationships. The economic one has been longstanding, as mining supplies and Mexican-mined copper flowed from Agua Prieta to Douglas. Labor has also flowed from south to north, first with agricultural workers (many encouraged to enter the United States without authorization) during World War II, and later with maquiladoras—factories built astride the border facilitating the transformation of raw materials into duty-free manufactured goods. Additionally, many Mexican residents of Agua Prieta have green cards and regularly work in Douglas, returning each night to their homes south of the border. In addition to workers, both shoppers, whose purchases contribute 80 percent of the town’s economy, and students, who make up perhaps one-quarter of Douglas’s elementary school population, cross the border each day from Mexico to the United States. And while some locals call for increased security and tighter border controls, others seek to enhance the economic and cultural ties between the sister cities, such as the Café Justo Cooperative, which facilitates the purchase of Chiapas growers’ coffee, its roasting in Agua Prieta, and its sale in Douglas.

Anthropologist Marko Tocilovac draws our attention to a similar point on the border, this time Friendship Park in San Diego, California. In chapter 9, (Dis)continuities of the Border Spectacle: An Analysis of a Binational Park in San Diego, California,