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Keywords: deportation, immigration law, state violence, care, abolitionism. Abstrac: The Duldung, or temporary suspension of deportation, is a key element in the German asylum, deportation and border policy. Immigration authorities issue it when the enforcement of a deportation order is not possible for the time being, often after a rejected asylum request. It was created in the first (West) German immigration law in 1965 and has since then been indispensable to control “unwanted” migration between humanitarian protection, illegalisation and deportation. After 2015, the use of Duldung again dramatically increased: Hundreds of thousands were governed in this uncertain “limbo”, under an imminent deportation threat, excluded from social security and sometimes allowed to perform unpaid or low-wage work, usually housed in semi-open camps. The numerous policy reforms seeking to reduce the use of the Duldung during these years were negotiated between a strong mandate for deportations, arguments for more humanitarian protection, and suggestions to tap into Duldung holders to address worsening shortages in the German labour market. This paper draws on ethnography with people holding a Duldung and their different “supporters” between 2016 and 2022, historical analysis, and administrative data to examine how this seeming conundrum is set up: Why have the numerous reforms of the last two decades, particularly, since 2015, failed to reduce the number of Duldung holders? I trace the following four key dynamics in their emergence and intersection: The binary logic of the (West) German immigration law (economic value, deportation), the humanitarian paradigm covering the former’s grey areas (exception), incremental border externalization (prevention), and migrant (and other social) struggles against deportation. Developing the idea of border abolitionist care, the paper suggests that to durably address the problem of Duldung, we need to carefully attend to the last one of the four, and work to undo the three first – the violence of contemporary immigration law. The paper works particularly against the humanitarian investments of the German Left and the migrant solidarity movement in Germany. Beyond research, it is motivated by my experience in activist campaigns in the German nexus of asylum and deportation policy after 2015. Questions emerging from such campaigns are: How to expose structural violence while organizing around individual cases and local struggles? How to interrupt the dominant logic of help and support that reproduces systemic violence? These are questions, which for me define abolitionist care. I develop this notion by referring to radical grassroots movements and scholarship alike.
As the physical limits of a state’s influence and power, borders are inherent sites ofcontestation over claims to space. In the modern day, one way the American government has sought to consolidate its claims over the southern border is through digital technologies (Chaar- López, 2019; De Lara, 2022) . A key element of this strategy has been the deployment of aerostat surveillance blimps by the Department of Homeland Security, which have been installed in three southern Arizona communities to date. In the summer of 2022, one of these blimps was installed in Nogales, Arizona, a town of about 20,000 people on the U.S.-Mexico border and the site of Arizona’s busiest border crossing. Because the blimp was installed suddenly without any community outreach, it sparked considerable controversy and pushback from local residents and public officials alike (Clark, 2022, 2023). These blimps are a particularly visible symbol of the state’s efforts to stake its claims to land utilizing technological approaches, claims which are often articulated using the concepts of property and territory. Though property is often associated with characteristics such as excludability and spatial boundedness, legal geographer Nicholas Blomley argues that this is a historically and culturally specific development that merges territorial logics with property, creating a hybridized regime that is now common throughout the Western world (2016) . This raises questions about how territorialized property was introduced to the United States and by what processes it became naturalized. This paper explores the emergence of territorialized property regimes in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands and the role boundary-making technologies played in its installation. I seek to understand how techno-scientific approaches have been deployed by the American state to consolidate its territorialized property claims over the frontier region since the end of the Mexican-American war, and how these logics continue to inform the federal government’s actions in the borderlands. I begin with a review of the literature on territory and property, and especially Blomley’s “territory of property” framework, with an eye towards applying these lessons to the context of the U.S.-Mexico border. Next, I conduct a case study on the role that technology has played in the enforcement of this paradigm, taking the implementation of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo as my primary case. Finally, I theorize the nature of ongoing conflicts over territorialized property in the borderlands, especially those that deploy alternative articulations of property to contest the State’s activities in the borderlands. For instance, Nogalians’ reactions to the installation of the border blimp are notable because of their mobilization of alternative claims to space that place individual and communal notions of property and ownership in conflict with the State’s. This is common in the borderlands context, similarly emerging in conflicts over the Border Patrol’s ability to enter private property without a warrant within 25 miles of the boundary and Indigenous groups’ enduring refusal to accept the legitimacy of western territorialized property. Together, these vignettes paint a picture of a territory-property regime that is still under construction, leaving openings for different articulations of property that are not burdened by the exclusionary logics of territoriality. Keywords: Property, territory, technology, U.S.-Mexico border / References: Blomley, N. (2016). The territory of property. Progress in Human Geography, 40(5), 593–609. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132515596380 Chaar-López, I. (2019). Sensing Intruders: Race and the Automation of Border Control. American Quarterly, 71(2), 495–518. https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2019.0040 Clark, J. (2022, June 29). Border Patrol blindsides community with 24-hour surveillance blimp. Nogales International. https://www.nogalesinternational.com/news/border-patrol-blindsides-community-with-24-hour-surveillance-blimp/article_33b2ea5c-f7dd-11ec-8a0d-63dd4bedc311.html Clark, J. (2023, January 4). Feds remove controversial Border Patrol surveillance blimp from Nogales. Nogales International. https://www.nogalesinternational.com/news/feds-remove-controversial- border-patrol-surveillance-blimp-from-nogales/article_eeb6bbea-8c79-11ed-b9d1-2b240f948221.html De Lara, J. (2022). Race, Algorithms, and the Work of Border Enforcement. Information & Culture, 57(2), 150–168.
Keywords: Refugee crisis, Balkan route, EU-Turkey borders, governmentality, asylum. The politics of deservingness encapsulated in the distinction between ‘refugees’ and ‘migrants’ have featured prominently in critiques of contemporarymigration and asylum regimes. While crucial, such accounts have not been adequately attendant to the categorical turbulences triggered by the incorrigible claims of people to move and settle as refugees. This presentation approaches the 2015/6 ‘refugee crisis’ precisely as a struggle from within and against the exclusionary politics of refugee protection that prompted not only the geographical re-bordering of Europe but also the conceptual re-bordering of the ‘refugee’ as the dominant representational paradigm of legitimate migration in Europe. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and critical policy analysis conducted between 2016-2022 in Greece and informed by the authors’ political engagement with migrant struggles since 2011, this presentation traces the transmutation of dominant taxonomies of migration and the emergence of new classificatory processes that aimed to tame unruly mobility and restore what was seen as the hijacked politics of protection in the aftermath of Europe’s ‘refugee crisis’. I start by tackling the productive tension between the constitutive force of migrant mobility and the governmentalisation of transportation routes that gave rise to what became known as ‘the Balkan route’ or ‘the humanitarian corridor.’ Reversing the dominant narrative of ‘economic migrants’ who ‘exploited the refugee flows’ leading to the partial closure of this path for nationalities without a ‘refugee profile,’ I illustrate that it was in fact those perceived as the ‘real refugees’ that appropriated, expanded and brought into view the previously invisible routes carved out by the so-called ‘economic migrants.’ I illustrate the ways in which this corridor was concomitantly shaped by migrants’ collective agency and the state’s selective presence and tactical absences, which set the conditions for the more permanent disruption of migrant mobility that followed. I proceed to expound on what I call the ‘counter-revolution of borders’: a revanchist reversal of the destabilised border regime through aggressive criminalisation and hierarchisation of migrant lives at the EU-Turkey border. I investigate how the enforcement of the mainland/island divide in Greece relied on the spatialisation of administrative categorisations, including ‘low and high recognition’ nationalities, migrants with ‘lawbreaking conduct’ and ‘vulnerable’ asylum-seekers. I outline how the destabilised asylum system was reworked towards galvanising a security apparatus, literally perching on the border between territorial and extraterritorial approaches to asylum responsibility. Through his genealogical investigation, I demonstate that the re-bordering of Europe relied on the spatialisation of new categorisations that partly incorporated and partly circumvented existing hierarchies of legitimacy between refugees and migrants. For example, the category of ‘asylum-seeker with/out a refugee profile’ that dominated relocation programs and tactics of dispersal and containment expanded the use of nationality as a basis for differential inclusion. Refugee profiling allowed authorities to implement policy as if all members of a national category were refugees, and by extension as if the members of other nationalities were not refugees. In this way, refugee profiling bypassed the main problem that presented for asylum systems under pressure: the long, highly complex, and individualised examination process of international protection claims. The erosion of the asylum system was expressed not only in the partial displacement of the migrant-refugee partition by the high-low asylum recognition rate divide. It was also manifest in admissibility procedures and vulnerability assessments that were introduced to uphold the new spatio-legal border between the Greek islands and the Greek mainland inaugurated with the EU-Turkey statement. Vulnerability did not map onto the migrant vs. refugee rationale of asylum but rather opened a second, largely orthogonal dimension in which origin and persecution played no role. The ationalisation and medicalisation of ‘refugeeness’ turned asylum-seekers’ identities and bodies into battlefields, with experts trying to diagnose, label, and assess the credibility of claims about them, and asylum-seekers performing them, negating them or using them as a social resource to move forward. This presentation argues that the prominence of nationality and vulnerability in admissibility and relocation procedures as part of the ongoing erosion of the asylum system reflects shifting socio-political compromises on what constitutes legitimate migration and foregrounds what this means for the contemporary asylum regime. By unravelling the thread of successive categories of governance and the material contestations that shaped and transgressed them, it showcases that figures of migration do not correspond to certain social groups nor to simple governmental constructions. They rather represent dynamic condensations of struggles between attempts to control and attempts to escape taxonomic borders as indispensable features of contemporary territorial borders.
For the past 20 years, Kutch district in western India has experienced several waves of land liberalisation and industrialization programs, among which wind power projects, but its proximity with Pakistan and the presence of Muslim pastorals populations on both sides of the border have also fostered more ancient ‘saffron’ Hindu nationalist discourses. Borders constitute contemporary totems of the nation, they are supposed to embody ‘natural’ boundaries between antagonist religious, linguistic, regional, or national identities. But in situation of transgression, negotiation, and circumvention of these boundaries, like in the case of Indian Muslims living between Kutch and Sindh, borders need to be re-affirmed and boundaries between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ restated, both violently and discursively. The Muslim demographic profile of Kutch borderlands with Pakistan has always nurtured suspicion, doubt and rumours about Indian Muslims’ ‘true’ loyalties and ‘natural’ affinities with co-religionists on the other side of the border. This racialised citizenship regime that enfolded right after the independence and the subsequent border disputes between India and Pakistan have justified the (re)colonisation of these lands with non-Muslim populations, deemed more ‘loyal’ to the Indian state and more ’legitimate’ citizens because broadly defined as Hindus. In the post-2001 earthquake period, this rhetoric of border-making adopted the language of post-disaster relief, development, modernisation, and tourism programs with the main objective of controlling borderland populations and keeping them employed. More recently, wind energy infrastructures aligned with this broad ethno-religious conception of Indian citizenship and space as Hindu and their expansion over new border areas served nationalist projects of territory revivalism, state-building and Muslim populations surveillance in a new-fashioned way. This paper proposes to analyse the case of Indian Muslims living on the border between Indian and Pakistan, precisely in Kutch district, and the reconfigurations of their lands, identities and livelihoods by colonisation, surveillance, and ‘development’ programs. The long-term socio-political history of this district reveals strong attempts coming from the Indian state to impose a unified, exclusive, and ethno-nationalist understanding of the nation, the border, and the citizen. Keywords: border-making; Hindu nationalism; citizenship regime; Muslims; surveillance
En Chile, numerosas publicaciones (Velasco & Gianturco, G., 2015; Echeverri, 2016; Pavez-Soto, 2016; Stefoni & Stang, 2017; Liberona Concha & López San Francisco, 2018; Guizardi et al, 2020) han indagado las formas de violencia que experimentan mujeres inmigrantes, contribuyendo a develar experiencias, escenarios y actores involucrados en diversos tipos de agresiones, lo cual ocurriría en una etapa migratoria específica: cuando se arriba al lugar de supuesto destino. En este sentido, cabe cuestionar ¿qué ocurre en otras etapas migratorias?, o bien, ¿la violencia sólo comenzaría al ingresar al país donde se busca asentarse? Los tres relatos antes presentados muestran una condición común, donde diversas experiencias violentas se replican a lo largo de diferentes historias de vida y no tienen una geografía exclusiva (Contreras, 2019). Por ende, es fundamental utilizar el enfoque de las trayectorias migratorias, siendo una herramienta teórico-metodológica que indaga la experiencia espacial de las personas, y que recoge sus testimonios para comprender secuencias de eventos en sus biografías (Schapendonk, J., & Steel, G., 2014; Rivera, 2015; Stefoni & Stang, 2017; Sassone, 2018), indistintamente la fase migratoria, la escala transitada y/o habitada, y la naturaleza del territorio residencia. Desde la lectura territorial de las trayectorias migratorias (Seguel,2021) es posible entender que los episodios de violencia sobrepasarían lo ocurrido en países de llegada, pues también ocurrirían en lugares de origen y tránsito (Vogt, 2018), o bien, en cada nodo que configura la trayectoria migratoria y residencial (Contreras, 2019). Esta presentación es parte de los resultados de una investigación y de la construcción de un artículo. Se analizan las trayectorias migratorias de mujeres latinoamericanas residentes del norte chileno. Se adopta la trayectoria migratoria como término teórico-metodológico que indaga la construcción espacio-temporal de la movilidad, siendo alimentado por métodos biográficos. El análisis a testimonios de 30 mujeres permitió comprender cómo construyen su movilidad en espacios de origen, tránsito y actual estadía. Sin embargo, sus estrategias y decisiones están interceptadas por un continuum de violencias. Se propone la violencia interterritorial para develar la espacialidad de las agresiones experimentadas por mujeres inmigrantes, quienes construyen rutas inciertas como estrategia para sortear toda exposición, en tanto, la violencia se recrudece y superpone en espacios de desplazamiento, permanencia y todo lugar de vida cotidiana. Pese a ello, ninguna experiencia de violencia detuvo el avance de las trayectorias migratorias femeninas, cuestión que exige repensar políticas migratorias que superen la concepción masculinizada y estado-centrista de la migración. Palabras clave: Trayectoria migratoria, Violencia, Inmigración, racismo, frontera REFERENCIAS BIBLIOGRÁFICAS: Contreras, Y. (2019). Trayectorias migratorias. Entre trayectorias directas, azarosas y nómades. Investigaciones Geográficas, 58, 4-20. https://doi.org/10.5354/0719-5370.2019.55729; Echeverri, M. M. (2016). Otredad racializada en la migración forzada de afrocolombianos a Antofagasta (Chile). Nómadas (Col), 91-103.; Guizardi, M. L., Contreras, E. L., Valdebenito, F., & Nazal, E. (2020). Trajectories of violence: The border experiences of peruvian women between Tacna (Peru) and Arica (Chile). Simbiótica. Revista Eletrônica, 7(3), 373-403.; Liberona Concha, N., & López San Francisco, E. (2018). Crisis del sistema humanitario en Chile. Refugiadas colombianas deslegitimadas en la frontera norte. Estudios atacameños. Arqueología y Antropología Surandinas, 60, 193-212. https://doi.org/10.4067/S0718-10432018005001502; Pavez-Soto, I. (2016). Violencia sexual contra niñas migrantes en Chile: Polivictimización, género y derechos / Sexual violence against migrant girls in Chile: Poly-victimization, gender and rights. Rumbos TS. Un espacio crítico para la reflexión en Ciencias Sociales, 14, 113-131.; Rivera, L. (2015). Las trayectorias en los estudios de migración: Una herramienta para el análisis longitudinal cualitativo. En Métodos cualitativos y su aplicación empírica: Por los caminos de la investigación sobre migración internacional (pp. 455-494). Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales; Dirección General de Asuntos del Personal Académico; El Colegio de la Frontera Norte A.C.; Schapendonk, J., & Steel, G. (2014). Following Migrant Trajectories: The Im/Mobility of Sub-Saharan Africans en Route to the European Union. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 104(2), 262-270. https://doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2013.862135; Seguel, B. (2021). Una lectura feminista e interseccional a las trayectorias migratorias de mujeres colombianas residentes en el norte chileno [Tesis para optar al Grado de Magíster en Geografía, Universidad de Chile]. https://repositorio.uchile.cl/handle/2250/186837. Stefoni, C., & Stang, F. (2017). La construcción del campo de estudio de las migraciones en Chile: Notas de un ejercicio reflexivo y autocrítico. Íconos. Revista de Ciencias Sociales, 58, 109-129.; Velasco, L., & Gianturco, G. (2015). Migración internacional y biografías multiespaciales: Una reflexión metodológica. En Métodos cualitativos y su aplicación empírica: Por los caminos de la investigación sobre migración internacional (pp. 115-150). Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales; Dirección General de Asuntos del Personal Académico; El Colegio de la Frontera Norte A.C.; Vogt, W. A. (2018). Lives in Transit: Violence and Intimacy on the Migrant Journey. University of California Press.