Narrating identity and territoriality: The cases of the U.S.-Mexico and U.S.-Canada borderlands.

Analysing the processes and relationships of political territoriality and collective identity in the American borderlands, this thesis examines the narrative and material dimensions of policies increasingly favouring securitised border 'control'. This 'reterritorialisation' contrasts markedly with concurrent moves to increase economic integration under the North American Free Trade Agreement and with long patterns of transnational socio-cultural interaction, emblematic of larger relational, transnational 'mobilities' fostered by globalisation. Through a historical and transdisciplinary survey, borders are examined as representations and socio-political constructs: a unique, contingent, political cartography connected to a precise, early modern notion of space and identity. Borders are in a continual process of being reproduced through both material means and supportive state-produced 'texts' or narratives. The analysis is part of a larger project in International Relations: the development of the 'identities/borders/orders' heuristic triad, designed to narrow and produce new theoretical and empirical insights by coupling three key concepts and exploring the co-constitutive relationships. Focussing on the identity-border link within the triad, the first case study analyses 'Operation Hold the Line' and related events in the securitisation of the southern borderlands against undocumented migration. The second case study provides an account of major official documentation and public debate framing current developments on the northern border, including a reading of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996. Border policy is understood as an example of reflexive territoriality, suggesting continual, ever speedier revision, monitoring, and reproduction of a state's constructed strategy responding to control defined 'risks', such as migration. These regulations are fed and actualised by new information flows and technologies, as the state's attempt to 'control' its borders by making them political realities of difference with particular material and normative outcomes. Here, the politics of representation involves an image of border 'security' which effects the socio-spatialisation of collective identity, specifically the reinforcement of difference and a secure nationalism narrative. The securitisation also reflects a modern understanding of knowledge as regulation and order

Fencing in Failure: Effective Border Control is Not Achieved by Building More Fences

New proposals for more fencing and Border Patrol agents along the U.S.-Mexico border may only perpetuate an unsuccessful and counterproductive policy that does not effectively enhance national security or control undocumented immigration

Achieving 'Security and Prosperity': Migration and North American Economic Integration

Most of the border-enforcement and immigration-reform proposals currently being considered in Washington, DC, are not comprehensive or adequate solutions to the issue of undocumented immigration. The process of North American economic integration, and development within Mexico itself, create structural conditions that encourage Mexican migration to the United States. However, the multilateral agreements that have paved the way for this integration -- the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the 2005 Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP) -- do not adequately deal with the issue of labor migration. Real security and prosperity for all three NAFTA partners requires incorporating an agreement on labor migration into the project of North American economic integration. Without such a labor accord, additional security measures along the U.S.-Mexico border will not be successful in reducing undocumented migration. Multilateral cooperation is particularly important in an era where security threats, such as terrorism, extend across North America's collective borders. Among the findings of this report: The near-tripling of U.S.-Mexico trade in the post-NAFTA period has been closely matched by a dramatic increase in undocumented immigration from Mexico to the United States, from an average of 260,000 per year during the 1990-94 period to approximately 485,000 per year in the 2000-2004 period. U.S. lawmakers should evaluate the lessons of the European experience in managing migration -- particularly the dual approach of development assistance to reduce migratory pressures and strengthened regional border control. Transnational criminal networks will continue to undermine border-control efforts as long as these efforts are viewed exclusively as a national concern and are separated from complementary policies on aid, trade, development, and governance. U.S. lawmakers should consider three policy options: a well-designed guest worker program that includes a path to citizenship; the temporary expansion of permanent legal immigration to meet U.S. labor needs; and the creation of NAFTA immigration visas. In the absence of a comprehensive solution to the problem of undocumented immigration, in a few short years we may again find ourselves at a familiar juncture: listening to the same tired political arguments for and against some sort of temporary worker program, amnesty, or both