Global Capitalism’s Bouncers

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https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/10/global-capitalisms-bouncers/



Maria lived in the United States for eighteen years. She worked multiple jobs while raising two sons, a daughter, and several grandchildren. On her way home from church one Sunday, she was stopped at a checkpoint outside her trailer park. Lacking the requisite papers to be in the country, her car was seized, and she was thrown into the merciless and well-greased US deportation mill.

About her forced removal and subsequent separation from her family, she said, “I became so sad I could barely move.”

Todd Miller, veteran journalist and author of Border Patrol Nation, uses Maria’s tragedy to show the incredible geographic and psychological reach of the Border Patrol and its proxy agencies — which now include local police forces who enforce immigration violations far from the border, and the first-ever state-run Border Patrol, South Carolina’s Immigration Enforcement Unit. The “border,” once a contested hot zone in the Southwest, has become a mobile vacuum, ready to disappear undocumented immigrants and devastate communities from Niagara Falls, New York to Miami, Florida.

Immigration enforcement has become especially draconian and pervasive since 9/11. Institutionalized racial profiling, hate-seeding, community targeting, the dismantling of due process, the widespread destruction of families, prolonged detention in “squalid conditions,” a culture of impunity and violence — all are being applied with an ever-broader reach.

The money involved in the “border security industrial complex” will balloon, according to estimates cited by Miller, from $74.5 billion in 2012 to $107.3 billion in 2020. Meanwhile, “thanks to the militarization and expansion of the ‘border’ region, 197 million Americans now live within the jurisdiction of US Customs and Border Patrol” — what Miller and others have called a “Constitution-Free Zone.”