\u27He used to be a Pollero\u27 the Securitisation of Migration and the Smuggler/migrant Nexus at the Mexico-Guatemala Border

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in an unmonitored crossing along the Mexico-Guatemala border, this article explores how enhanced border securitisation made migration and border smuggling more suspect, illicit, and risky. In a region where identities have been fluid, official documentation is uneven, and immigration policing is racialised, border residents increasingly use racial stereotypes and fears to conjure the Central American migrant ‘other’ to protect themselves from being mistaken as smugglers and as migrants. Residents cope with an unpredictable landscape through silence, rumour, and distancing themselves from migrants which further justifies securitised migration policies and makes migrants and residents less secure

“No Place for Old Men”: Immigrant Duration, Wage Theft, and Economic Mobility among Day Laborers in Denver, Colorado

Day laborers are a highly vulnerable population, due to their contingent work arrangements, low socioeconomic position, and precarious immigration status. Earlier studies posited day labor as a temporary bridge for recent immigrants to achieve more stable employment, but recent studies have observed increasing duration of residence in the United States among foreign-born day laborers. This article draws on 170 qualitative interviews and a multi-venue, year-long street corner survey of 411 day laborers in the Denver metropolitan area to analyze how duration in the United States affects day laborers' wages, work, and wage theft experiences. Compared to recent immigrants, foreign-born day laborers with longer duration in the United States, we found, worked fewer hours and had lower total earnings but also had higher hourly wages and lower exposure to wage theft. We draw on qualitative interviews to address whether this pattern represented weathering, negative selection, or greater discernment. Rather than upward or downward mobility, long duration immigrant day labors had more jagged incorporations experiences. Interviews suggest that day laborers draw on experience to mitigate the risk of wage theft but that the value of experience is undercut by the fierce competition of daily recruitment, ultimately highlighting the compounding vulnerabilities facing longer duration and older immigrant day laborers. The article highlights duration as an understudied precarity factor which can adversely impact the economic assimilation of long duration immigrants who persist in contingent markets like day labor

Border Controls in Transit Countries and their Implications for Migrant Smuggling: A Comparison of Mexico and Indonesia

Galemba R, Vogel A, Missbach A. Border Controls in Transit Countries and their Implications for Migrant Smuggling: A Comparison of Mexico and Indonesia. Forum on Crime and Society. Submitted;(Special issue on Comparative Border Externalization)