Forced Depopulation of Border Areas

Criminal violence forces people to leave Mexico and take refuge in the United States, or at least that is the most common narrative. Organized crime and drug trafficking have led to Mexico having one of the highest homicide rates in the world and therefore many flee the country. Mexico is ranked 23rd among the world’s most dangerous countries and is undergoing a humanitarian crisis (^{The United Nations High Commissions for Refugees [UNHCR], 2016}). According to the United Nations and the IDMC, criminals are the ones responsible (^{IDMC, 2015a}; ^2015b). However, this argument ignores two factors. First, Mexico is rich in natural resources, including metals (steel, lead, gold, nickel, zinc and silver) and hydrocarbons (shale gas) (^{Sinnot, Nash & De la Torre, 2010}). Second, not all of the region’s violence is related to the cartels: it includes femicide, killings of environmental activists, political assassinations and forced disappearances (^{Comisión Interamericana de Derechos Humanos [CIDH] y Organización de los Estados Americanos [OEA], 2015}) Criminal violence, even when it is rampant, is only part of a dangerous cocktail that serves to “wipe clean” areas where local communities resist dispossession. This can be called forced depopulation.

According to the IDMC, of the 287 000 Mexicans displaced by violence and the 91 000 displaced by disasters, the majority are in the states of Chihuahua, Nuevo Leon, Tamaulipas, Sinaloa, Durango, Michoacan, Guerrero and Veracruz (^{IDMC, 2017}). All these states are rich in minerals, non-renewable resources and shale gas. These states are also famous for their narco-trafficking-related violence. A significant number of forced disappearances have occurred in US border areas in which the army and criminal gangs are jointly involved (^{Comisión Nacional de Derechos Humanos [CNDH], 2016}). For example, Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua (across the border from El Paso, Texas), was the most violent city in the country in 2009 and 2010 (^{Ortega, 2010}). Nuevo Leon, Coahuila and Tamaulipas are states controlled by Los Zetas (which is responsible for thousands of the 300 000 forced disappearances) and by the Gulf Cartel, whose leaders are protected by local politicians (^{Martínez, 2013}).

These states are also located on top of a very important source of shale gas on the Mexico-Texas border called Eagle Ford Shale Basin in the United States and Cuenca de Burgos on the Mexican side (^{Lallanilla, 2015}). Fracking, the method used to extract this shale gas, has important environmental consequences, as it requires the use of 7.6-15 million liters of water per extraction and also involves the use of polluting chemicals (^{Navarro & Bessi, 2015}). Exploitation of the shale gas in Eagle Ford requires 27 000 wells, and in an arid area where water is scarce, its intensive use is damaging agriculture and provoking more and more protests (^{Grillo, 2014}). Who are the victims of violence in these resource-rich territories coveted by criminal and legal corporations? According to a special report from the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH), the majority of displaced people in Mexico are peasants from communities with self-sustaining economies, environmental and human rights activists, small landowners, local authorities and journalists. Most of these groups represent a threat to the interests of extractive capital that want to appropriate their lands, either through explicit resistance (in the case of activists, authority figures not aligned with capital and peasants) or accusations (in the case of peasants). While the violent cartels certainly represent a major problem in Mexico that should not be ignored, there is a link between all of the depopulation strategies that reveals the role of transnational corporations, political elites and economic oligarchies in the daily displacement of people and creation of places of death in the region (^{CNDH, 2016}).

The data indicate that in countries rich in natural resources, the coincidence between forced displacement and criminal, misogynist and political violence is not accidental. This murderous combination reflects a policy of forced displacement that aims to achieve a conflict-free exploitation of resources, as these resources are increasingly valued in the global economy by the new technology, renewable resource and clean energy industries. To execute this strategy, a wide variety of armed actors-including drug traffickers and criminals as well as mercenaries, private security guards and hit men-sell their expertise in managing the technologies of death to powerful entities such as repressive governments or transnational corporations (or both) in what ^{Mbembe (2011)} has called the “indirect private government.”

This is the necropolitics-the politics of death-that Bobby Banerjee calls necrocapitalism, or the deaths appeased by economic profit. For Banerjee, necropolitics-which he defines as “practices of accumulation in (post) colonial contexts at the hands of specific economic actors [...] which involves dispossession, death, torture, suicide, slavery, habitat destruction, and the general administration of violence”-“is a new form of imperialism. The forced expulsion of peasants is followed by the control of natural resources that they once possessed” (^{Banerjee, 2008, p. 15}), and this is what we find in the forced migration that occurs in Mexico.

This is directly related to what Rodríguez Garavito calls “social minefields,” that is, the territories of indigenous peoples that are rich in natural resources and are contested by transnational corporations, criminal groups and states. These territories are mined for having resources and for being dangerous. This is where the right to prior consultation is promoted, which is a legal mechanism for legitimizing with a purported consultation the previously made decision to exploit those territories (^{Rodríguez, 2012, pp. 5-6}). So, let us be honest: why negotiate with poor indigenous communities sitting on rich deposits of oil, water, minerals and hydrocarbons if they can be expelled from their lands by indirectly instigating violence through private actors with economic-criminal or misogynist motivations?

While every Latin American country with high homicide rates also possesses minerals, precious metals and hydrocarbons, for the purposes of our forced depopulation argument, the extraction of hydrocarbons along the border serves as an example of how forced displacement, political repression, and criminal and misogynist violence in resource-rich territories all converge in the same place. Other academics have already established this connection between gas extraction and murders, forced disappearances, femicide and forced displacement (^{Correa-Cabrera, 2015}).

Guadalupe Correa, for example, has stated that in the case of Coahuila and Tamaulipas, violence has been instigated by the elites to force corporations to contract private security. Correa-Cabrera argues that there is a spatial convergence of global flows and economic inequality. In this specific area, there are at least four of these flows: the maquiladora industry, the extractive industry, migration and transnational crime. The impact of these phenomena has led to an increase in income inequality in the region, as its internal dynamics widen the gap between rich and poor while reinforcing social inequality (^{Correa-Cabrera, 2015}).

In her book, Drug War Capitalism, journalist Dawn Paley states that internal conflict and militarization occur in geographic areas that are crucial for energy and extractive projects. Her field work in Colombia, Guatemala and Honduras indicates that these phenomena also coincide with sociopolitical opposition to megaprojects such as oil extraction and exploitation, large-scale agriculture, hydroelectric projects and valuable hardwoods. Connections between the war on drugs, paramilitary violence and gas extraction are not uncommon because non-state actors use them to intimidate their opponents and control areas rich in natural resources (^{Paley, 2014}).

According to this evidence and its different interpretations, it can be concluded that forced displacement is not collateral damage but rather the desired or intended result, namely, the forced depopulation of these regions. However, the state is not alone in this. Corporations are actively, although quietly, involved in supporting violence, as it allows them to argue that investment in these regions is too expensive, as a way of hiding their true interests. Ultimately, these corporate actors allow criminals to make extractions on their behalf.

Asylum as an Administration of Suffering

Once people are expelled from their homes and request asylum in the United States, they face the suffering management dispositif, that is, the series of necropolitical dispositifs designed to control the space and time of the subjects. According to ^{Kleinman, Das and Lock (1997)}, social suffering includes conditions that are usually categorized and studied separately and individually-violence, drug addiction, post-traumatic stress disorder, depression-and is used to link personal problems with social problems. This demonstrates that suffering is a social experience that afflicts both rich and poor countries but that primarily affects the marginalized and dispossessed classes.

For ^{Kleinman et al. (1997)}, the dominant powers carry out various technological interventions to “treat” social suffering, which actually intensify the suffering due to their moral, economic and gender effects, and end up normalizing social pathologies or pathologizing the psychology of terror. These policies translate the local expressions of victims into the universal, professional language of complaint and restitution, such as the language of human rights. This in turn re-enacts the manifestations and experiences of suffering, bringing about the intensification of suffering itself. Das calls this the “judicial and bureaucratic appropriation of suffering” (^{Das, 2008}). The bureaucratization of social suffering aims to manipulate the victims’ time because waiting is a symbolic dimension of political subordination (^{Auyero, 2013}). The lives of those who suffer are lived in times that are directed by powerful agents, under a state of domination that “is lived as a waiting period: at first waiting with delusion, and then with impotence while others make decisions, and ultimately surrendering to the authority of others” (^{Auyero, 2013, p. 18}).

The collection of public necropolicies that appropriate suffering in order to bureaucratize it and to symbolically dominate others by imposing waiting periods are the mechanisms for the administration of suffering. The dispositifs for the administration of suffering develop subjects that are of use to them and include different types of public necropolicies-committees and special commissions, regulations, victim assistance units-that function through technologies that regulate political agency. The first type of public necropolicy is inter-institutional complexity. Representatives of the executive and legislative branches are brought together in committees or councils in which organizations may or may not have representation but which function as collaboration forums without any real influence. This inter-institutional scaffolding sets in motion a complex set of bureaucratic procedures that give people the illusion that they are moving towards justice, even if the judicial branch is absent from the process, and whose main feature is waiting. As Auyero states:

The waiting produces uncertainty and arbitrariness. Uncertainty and arbitrariness produces a specific subjective effect among those who need the state to survive: they submit in silence to usually arbitrary state requirements. To put it bluntly, everyday political domination is what happens when apparently nothing happens, when people ‘just wait’ (^{Auyero, 2013, pp. 36-37}).

The second type of public necropolicy is subjectification. Public necropolicies build passive subjects, who are the subject of intervention to “positively” manage their suffering and political agency through the “judicial appropriation” of their suffering (^{Das, 2008}). The subjects become objects of a government intervention that they are always awaiting, and “the habitual exposure to long hours of delay shapes a specific set of submissive behaviors” (^{Auyero, 2013, p. 25}). This has implications for political subjectification as will be seen later.

The US asylum system can be considered a dispositif for managing suffering, not only because its purpose is to control the time and space of asylum seekers-they cannot move from place to place while awaiting the judge's decision-but also because it is composed of the whole set of necropolicies. As already mentioned, the law no longer delivers justice in biopolitics and necropolitics but is used to homogenize populations. In this case, there are clearly administrative elements of the exercise of law that show how the instruments for administering international justice-protection against persecution-are used by the United States for controlling immigration.

There are clearly administrative and procedural aspects of the exercise of the right of asylum that show how some instruments that should be used for the administration of international justice-such as the refugee treaty reflected in the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA)-are used to manage forced migration and the suffering of those fleeing their home countries. Administrative tactics facilitate migration control in different ways. First is the division of the system into affirmative and defensive procedures, and the semi-judicial nature of immigration management, which leaves much latitude for making decisions that are even more subjective and arbitrary than expected under Anglo-Saxon law, where the role of the judge and jurisprudence is more important than the laws derived from the Constitution. This division enables different treatment of applicants based on class and gender criteria.

On one hand, applicants in the affirmative procedure are those who enter the country with a visa, or who have an expired visa, or who do not have permission to work while in the country, and who have not been placed in deportation proceedings. These requests are reviewed by an official from US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), who, if he or she does not approve an application, refers it for judicial review by an immigration judge from the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR). According to Kurzban: “The applications that have been first submitted to the AO (Asylum Officer) are called ‘affirmative applications’ because they do not intervene in deportation proceedings as a type of ‘defense’ against deportation” (^{Kurzban, 2014, p. 698}).

On the other hand, this is the point at which the case becomes defensive. The applicant sees a judge in an immigration court as part of the deportation proceedings, hence the name “defensive procedure.” Immigration courts are administrative entities that resemble courts. According to Anna Jessica Cabot, legal coordinator of the Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center in El Paso, Texas, the immigration courts:

Although they’re kind of like a court, they’re in fact administrative bodies, and they say ok, immigration benefits are such that we must give people a place that looks like a court, primarily to ensure that their rights in this area can be appealed (^{Cabot, 2012}).

Although immigration courts are administrative bodies that look like courts, the application of law in them is even more subjective than in criminal and civil courts. This is because, among other things, they provide little constitutional protection but rather a protection that, according to legal precedents, is restricted to the due process guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment, which applies to all people rather than just citizens. They also protect freedom of speech under the First Amendment, which allows non-immigrants to be members of communist and anarchist parties (Rafeedie vs. INS 1992, in ^{Kurzban, 2014, p. 159}). In fact, Cabot states that the law:

…can be changed according to the judge presiding over each court... each judge can bend the rules within their own courts and this gives them much wider discretionary powers than judges in other courts in the US such as criminal courts, civil courts... to change the rules to accommodate their prejudices and preconceptions expressed in other arenas (^{Cabot, 2012}).

As for the defensive procedures, these were established in the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, which requires the immediate removal or deportation of undocumented persons. Undocumented immigrants at the border or those who are denied refugee status by an immigration officer (IO) are summarily deported unless they seek asylum before a judge. Undocumented immigrants can seek asylum and express a well-founded fear of persecution before an IO, who determines whether or not the person has a “credible fear” of persecution. If the applicant proves to have a credible fear of persecution he can obtain a humanitarian parole while his legal status is resolved, after providing proof of identity and sufficient evidence that he will appear at hearings and does not pose a threat to the internal security of the United States. If credible fear is not proven, applicants can request a review that takes up to seven days, during which time they remain in detention.

Once credible fear is verified, they go to a hearing with a judge in which they ask for asylum, deportation suspension, or protection under the United Nations Convention against Torture (^{Kurzban, 2014, pp. 181 and 698}). If not, applicants remain in detention until they have their hearing, which can take considerable time to schedule. Although the amount of time in detention is not standard across all circuit courts, most have established precedents dictating that a “reasonable” detention timeframe cannot be “years,” as has happened in cases in which applicants have remained in detention up to 4.5 years. In that particular case, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a “reasonable time” could not be longer than six months (Nadarajah vs. González, cited in ^{Kurzban, 2014}).

The success of the credible fear interview depends entirely on the judge's perception. This prerogative is also found in the REAL ID Act (1996) that hands judges the:

…adverse credibility determination, with which they can decide that the applicants' stories are not credible, based only on inconsistencies in the story, even inconsistencies that have nothing to do with the background of the application, such as the color of the house, the time of day when something happened, etc. This kind of subjective judgment is insufficient for the judge to dismiss the plaintiff’s testimony (^{Cabot, 2012}).

Cabot states that similar inconsistencies are very frequent in cases of Mexicans requesting asylum, given that:

They haven’t seen a lawyer, and also many people flee to the border, literally run to the border. We know people who have been shot and taken to the hospital as soon as they cross; so they clean and drug them, then give them analgesics and send them back to the border for their interview. So they are under the effects of strong analgesics just hours after being shot, and say things that can hardly be consistent with anything they might say in the future, but their testimony is discarded (^{Cabot, 2012}).

Later, Cabot confirms that this is a determining factor in the rejection of the application because:

If you have a judge with the preconceived notion that Mexicans do not deserve asylum, and with the power to decide that their story is not credible based only on small things, then it is incredibly easy for that judge to just say that their testimony is not credible (^{Cabot, 2012}).

Crystal ^{Massey (2012)}, the human rights defender from the Southwest Asylum & Migration Institute (SAMI), states that at least in the case of Mexicans, the division between affirmative and negative procedures serves as its own filter to see who can access the asylum system as an immunization against criminal violence, which does not mean that they obtain it only for that reason. ^{Massey (2012)} affirms that people who have a visa are generally middle class, well-informed Mexicans who have the means or knowledge to obtain documents that allow them to cross borders, or who know that expressing interest in asylum while at the border can get them placed in temporary detention. Massey believes that young men spend more time in detention because they are the ones involved in the drug trade or gangs. During detention people are abused, as they are forced to remain for long periods in degrading or uncomfortable conditions, or they are intimidated to pressure them into withdrawing their asylum claims. Young children are separated from their parents and told that they may remain separated for a long time. Another tactic that is used to prevent access to the asylum system is time because you cannot apply for asylum after having stayed one year in US territory. Applicants submit their applications (form I-589) along with their testimony and the supporting evidence during the first meetings with the judges, in their master calendar hearings. Because judges have heavy caseloads-there is a two-year backlog-some applicants who arrived in 2012 did not have their hearings until 2014. According to Ileana Holguín, lawyer and Executive Director of Diocesan Migrant & Refugee Services, Inc. in El Paso, Texas, case reviews go faster in detention courts because these are private and the government has to pay for each arrested applicant. As such, they hurry the cases along to save money (^{Holguín, 2012}). However, many cases are lost because people do not receive any legal advice or do not know about the one-year time constraint. ^{Holguín (2012)} states that judges are aware of this situation and are more willing to expedite cases and have even committed to review three cases in three and a half hours, which also indicates that they already know what their decision will be.

Disposability Pockets

On January 27, 2017, President Donald Trump issued an executive order on immigration that not only prohibited the entry into the US by citizens from seven Arab countries but also dealt a historic blow to the asylum and refugee system in general. The order suspended general refugee admissions for 120 days, and admissions of Syrians until further notice, and placed a 50 000-person limit on annual admissions (Obama accepted 150 000). Although the order imposes significant legal challenges on those who process asylum claims, there are important social and human implications that are not very evident in the consequences of those measures. One important consequence is the emergence of what are called disposability pockets, which refers to people who live around open-air garbage dumps waiting for some informal work to come their way, or around sewers and improvised migrant shelters. An unknown number of disposability pockets can be found in the border city of Tijuana, which is located near the border city of San Diego, California. Thousands of asylum seekers and migrants have been trapped in Tijuana since the executive order was revoked because they were waiting for their asylum applications to be processed.

In early February 2017, a visit was made to the migrant shelters to document this humanitarian crisis, where we expected to find a certain type of immigrant: Mexican women fleeing the cartels and gender violence as well as Guatemalans, Hondurans and Salvadorans fleeing gang violence in their countries. However, we also found unexpected immigrants: Haitians who sought refuge in Brazil after the 2010 Haitian earthquake but who later left Brazil because of the economic and political crisis there that has dramatically reduced employment possibilities. These Haitians are not necessarily the typical “economic” immigrants; many are engineers, doctors and architects between 20 and 30 years old. In fact, this small group makes up most of those who are trapped in Tijuana.

According to activist ^{Soraya Vázquez (2017)} of the Tijuana Humanitarian Aid Strategic Committee, six Haitians arrived in Tijuana on May 23, 2016. The next day there were 100. Two months later, there were 15 000, and by the end of 2016, there were some 30 000 Haitians stuck in Tijuana who had come from Brazil via a human trafficking network that according to Vázquez has not been documented. By comparison, some 10 000 Syrians sought asylum in the United States in the same period. Asylum seekers cannot work, do not have permanent residency, and, if they are Haitians, often do not speak Spanish. However, they must support themselves and their families while waiting for immigration officials to process their applications. To make matters worse, they have lost all possibility of establishing themselves in the United States after President Donald Trump decided to end the Temporary Protected Status that his predecessor, Barack Obama, had approved after a 7.0 earthquake hit the Caribbean island in 2010. In May 2017, it was extended for six more months, but in January 2018, it was ended, and Haitians were given 18 months to leave the United States or be deported in July 2019.

These people live in Tijuana in open-air garbage dumps, sewers and makeshift shelters. Many look for manual labor jobs in the black market, cleaning houses and offices, working in maquilas or delivering pizzas for miserable salaries. This whole situation on the border recalls what Henry A. Giroux calls the machinery of disposability: “What has emerged in this new juncture is an intensification of the practice of disposability in which more individuals and groups are considered as waste, consigned to areas of abandonment, surveillance and imprisonment” (^{Giroux, 2014, par. 2}).

People forced to flee natural disasters and unimaginable violence in their countries of origin become disposable; people are human waste in dumps and sewers at the gateway to one of the richest nations. In this way people are confined to social spaces defined by what Edward W. Soja calls the “political organization of space,” but with death as the main goal. Soja's idea of spatial (in)justice establishes that wealth and poverty are distributed geographically according to class, race and gender (^{Soja, 2009}). These forces determine what he calls “discriminatory localization,” which is created “by prejudices imposed on certain populations due to their geographic locations” and is “fundamental in the creation of social injustice and in the creation of spatial structures of privilege and advantage” (^{Soja, 2009, p. 3}). Soja believes that “spatial organization [...] is a particularly powerful source of spatial injustice” (^{Soja, 2009, p. 3}).

While his examples range from apartheid, residential segregation and militarization, I believe that national borders, such as those that divide the United States and Mexico, are important places of injustice due to economic inequality and the proliferation of economic projects such as road construction and mining activities. Soja states that:

Geographically, unequal development and underdevelopment provide another framework for interpreting processes that produce injustice, but as with other processes, it is only when this inequality solidifies into more lasting structures of privilege and disadvantage that intervention becomes necessary (^{Soja, 2009, p. 3}).

Disposability pockets are therefore areas of spatial injustice in which vulnerable populations, especially migrant ones, are forced to live in inhumane conditions and work in illegal labor markets with the tacit approval of a government that should, in theory, and according to human rights legislation, be a protective government. It is a radicalized and spatialized version of what sociologists call “pockets of poverty,” that is, neighborhoods in which the extremely poor tend to be confined in ghettos, even as prosperity grows around them. They are emerging not only in Tijuana but all along the northern border of Mexico thanks to repression by the United States.