Untitled-3 NOTA CRÍTICA Thinking Out of Bounds: A Critical Analysis of Academic and Human Rights Writings on Migrant Deaths in the U.S.-Mexico Border Region Joseph Nevins Vassar College The number of unauthorized immi- grants who have died attempting to cross the U.S. southern boundary from Mexico has grown to alarming levels. It is conservatively estimated that between January 1995 and Sep- tember 2003—a time of an intensi- fied enforcement strategy along the U.S.-Mexico boundary—there were over 2,600 documented deaths of unauthorized migrants in the bor- der region (see CRLAF, 2003). These deaths have received critical atten- tion by academics, policy analysts, and human rights advocates and monitors alike (see, among others, ACLU and CRLAF, 2001; Bustamante, 2001; Cornelius, 2001; Esbach et al., 2001; Hing, 2001; and Reyes et al., 2002).1 In part because of such scrutiny, the government of the United States and, to a lesser extent, that of Mexico, have responded in vari- ous ways. The U.S. government has instituted patrol flights to spot mi- grants in distress, and it has in- creased search-and-rescue missions in hazardous areas. U.S. authori- ties have also posted warning signs at high-risk crossing points, dis- tributed fliers in Mexican border towns, and advertised on Mexican radio and television stations advis- ing would-be migrants of the po- tential dangers. Recently, Wash- ington has constructed 30-foot towers with signal beacons in “high-risk” areas of the desert that, when activated by migrants, send a distress signal to the Border Pa- trol. (Washington currently has plans to construct 20 of these tow- ers.) For its part, the Mexican gov- ernment has undertaken initiatives including an education campaign to warn migrants of the dangers they face and explain how to bet- ter prepare and protect themselves if they are going to cross (Associ- ated Press, 2002; Reuters, 2002; Villalobos, 2003; U.S. CBP, 2003). Despite these efforts, there has not been a significant reduction in the 1 I am grateful for the constructive comments made by two anonymous reviewers. 172 MIGRACIONES INTERNACIONALES growth of the death toll. Indeed, crossing the boundary seems to have become only more deadly, with June 2002 being the deadli- est month on record in terms of the number of fatalities (see CRLAF, 2002; Nevins, 2002a). The reactions of academics, policy analysts, and human rights advocates who have monitored, re- ported on, and analyzed the mi- grant deaths differ significantly from the responses of government officials—especially those in the United States. Nevertheless, collec- tively, the reactions share a key foundational assumption: The U.S. government has a right to control its territorial boundaries and, thus, to determine who can enter the country. These parties who criti- cize and issue blame for the deaths avoid indicating the principle rea- son why such deaths occur: the very presence of the international boundary as an enforced line of control. Instead, responses tend to decry the deaths while focusing on epiphenomenal factors. In this article, I do not seek to explain why these parties fail to cri- tique boundary enforcement in and of itself—an endeavor that would require guesswork. Instead, I focus on how this failure reflects and helps to reproduce three in- terrelated “ways of seeing” (Berger, 1980). The first has to do with a conceptualization of space that ac- cepts national territorial sover- eignty as unproblematic. The sec- ond concerns a conceptualization of violence that is insufficiently structural. And the third relates to a conservative interpretation of what constitutes human rights. In analyzing these worldviews, I examine critically some principle writings by academics and policy analysts. My intent is not to casti- gate the authors—most of whom, collectively, have played a significant role in raising the profile of a tragic issue: the growing death toll in the border region. However, given that all the writings seem to be informed by a desire to bring about an end to such deaths, it is imperative to en- gage in a critical dialogue about the factors that give rise to the fatalities. I assert that by not calling for an end to boundary enforcement as it relates to immigration or by legitimating such enforcement, the authors are re- signing themselves to migrant deaths—albeit in smaller numbers than are currently occurring if what they advocate in terms of remedial measures were to be put into place. Migrant deaths are the inevitable outcome of a border regime charac- terized by intense, transboundary social relations, marked socioeco- nomic inequality between the United States and migrant-sending countries (in terms of the U.S. south- ern boundary, principally Mexico and, to a lesser extent, Central American nations), and boundary enforcement. Thus, as long as sig- nificant migratory pressures exist coupled with boundary regulation, migrant deaths will continue. Be- yond the matter of migrant deaths, human rights concerns related to boundary and immigration enforce- NOTA CRÍTICA 173 ment also exist, which have impor- tant moral and political implications for academic and policy analysts con- cerned with the well-being of unau- thorized immigrants. Before devel- oping this line of analysis, however, the article provides a brief historical geographical overview of migrant deaths along the boundary. Historical Roots of Migrant Deaths There is nothing new about risk and death being part of extralegal bound- ary crossing. Entering the United States without authorization has long been dangerous. As early as the late 1800s, for example, many un- authorized Chinese immigrants died while trying to circumvent bound- ary enforcement resulting from the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 (Lee, 2003). In 1953, floodwaters from the Rio Grande reportedly claimed the lives of between 300 and 400 would-be boundary crossers (García, 1980; also see Annerino, 1999). Tragedies were still common in the 1980s and the early 1990s, before the boundary buildup initiated dur- ing the early years of the Clinton administration (see Curry, 1986; Bailey et al., 1996; Wambaugh, 1984). They also occur in other “crossing” areas, such as the Carib- bean. There, a high number of would-be immigrants from the Do- minican Republic have drowned or been eaten by sharks as they tried to reach Puerto Rico to board a flight to the United States free of immi- gration controls (see Fineman, 1998). In the late 1980s and early 1990s, migrant deaths along the U.S.- Mexico boundary were declining vis- à-vis the migrant death toll of the mid-1980s. Since that time, how- ever, the number of deaths has grown considerably (Esbach et al., 2001; Reyes et al., 2002). Along southern California’s section of the bound- ary—home of Washington’s “Opera- tion Gatekeeper” (see Nevins, 2002c)—there were 23 deaths dur- ing the 1994 calendar year, for ex- ample. Since then, there has been a sharp upward trend, with an aver- age of 134 deaths annually between 1998 and 2001. Along the entire Southwest boundary, documented deaths increased from 87 in 1996 to an average of 391 between 1998 and 2001 (derived from CRLAF; also see Cornelius, 2001), which corre- sponds to the implementation of a new enforcement strategy. As op- posed to the old one of apprehend- ing migrants after they cross, the new strategy is one of “territorial denial” or “prevention through deterrence,” which attempts to thwart migrants from entering the United States through the forward deployment of growing numbers of Border Patrol agents and increased use of surveil- lance technologies and support in- frastructure.2 2 According to the national strategic vision of the U.S. Border Patrol (1994: 6): “The Border Patrol will achieve the goals of its strategy by bringing a decisive number of enforcement resources to bear in each major entry corridor [such as El Paso and San Diego]. The Border Patrol will increase the number of agents on the line [the boundary] 174 MIGRACIONES INTERNACIONALES Assessing changes in rates of mi- grant deaths over time is compli- cated by data sets that draw upon different geographies (the U.S. side versus both sides of the boundary), utilize different sources, and make different assumptions. Meanwhile, no comprehensive data set exists of migrant deaths over a long period. The U.S. Border Patrol, for ex- ample, did not keep national sta- tistics on migrant deaths prior to fiscal year 1999; before that, indi- vidual Border Patrol sectors kept their own, but it is not possible to aggregate this data due to varia- tions in reporting (see Reyes et al., 1999). Given these limitations, it is difficult to assess the severity of migrant deaths in the context of the Clinton-era-initiated boundary buildup vis-à-vis previous decades. The most comprehensive study is one by researchers with the Cen- ter for Immigration Research at the University of Houston (Esbach et al., 2001). Despite problems as- sociated with how the study framed its investigations—which may have led to an undercount of migrant deaths (see Reyes et al., 2002)—the findings suggest that there is not a significant difference between the annual numbers of documented fatalities in the mid- to late-1990s and the numbers in the mid-1980s. Indeed, they are re- markably similar. It is likely, how- ever, that the more recent numbers are relatively conservative (vis-à-vis those from 1985-1993) as a con- siderably higher proportion of to- tal deaths is taking place in isolated, rural areas—an outgrowth of the post-1993 boundary buildup strategy, which has pushed cross- ers away from urbanized areas— and thus many corpses are never found (see Cornelius, 2001; CRLAF; Esbach et al., 2001; Reyes et al., 2002). Hence, it is very likely that migrant deaths have increased be- cause of the 1990s buildup. Nev- ertheless, migrants died in signifi- cant numbers before the strategy initiated during Clinton’s first term. Immigrants trying to cross the boundary clandestinely have died in very large numbers as early as the 1950s. Whatever the cur- rent situation, crossing the bound- ary without authorization has long been a deadly enterprise. It has only become more so in the past decade. By the Border Patrol’s own cri- teria, this suggests that the vari- ous operations that make up its en- hanced boundary-enforcement strategy are failing to some degree (see U.S. Border Patrol, 1994). U.S. officials expected that opera- tions such as Hold-the-Line (El Paso), Gatekeeper (southern Cali- and make effective use of technology, raising the risk of apprehension high enough to be an effective deterrent. Because the deterrent effect of apprehensions does not become effective in stopping the flow until apprehensions approach 100% of those attempting entry, the strategic objective is to maximize the apprehension rate. Although a 100% apprehension rate is an unrealistic goal, we believe we can achieve a rate of apprehensions sufficiently high to raise the risk of apprehension to the point that many will consider it futile to continue to attempt illegal entry.” NOTA CRÍTICA 175 fornia), Safeguard (Arizona), and Rio Grande (Brownsville) would discourage a significant number of migrants from crossing: By push- ing them out into mountain and desert areas, migrants—after mak- ing a cost-benefit analysis—would rationally decide to forego the risks. Given that this has not hap- pened, Washington is arguably re- sponsible (at least partially) for the deaths. By knowingly “forcing” people to cross risky terrain, U.S. authorities contribute to the re- sulting fatalities. Indeed, this is the dominant manner in which boundary-buildup critics frame the problem of migrant deaths. Framing the Fatalities By establishing the infrastructure that makes it more difficult for mi- grants to cross in urbanized areas, U.S. authorities have increased the likelihood that unauthorized mi- grants will attempt to cross in ru- ral areas where the enforcement ap- paratus is less dense, areas that are also more life threatening given the hazardous environmental condi- tions. Nevertheless, Washington refuses to acknowledge any re- sponsibility for the growing death toll. Instead, it blames professional smugglers, or coyotes, for leading people into high-risk areas and then abandoning them (see, for example, Los Angeles Times, 1998), even though the significant growth in the use of coyotes has been the predictable, direct result of the enhanced boundary-enforcement strategy (Andreas, 2000; Cornelius 1998, 2001; Reyes et al., 2002). Indeed, the Border Patrol points to increased fees charged by smug- glers (presumably a result of in- creased demand and hardship) as one of the indices of the Border Patrol’s success (see U.S. Border Patrol, 1994). Washington’s contention that the coyotes are culpable seems to have resonated even with the Mexican government. For example, a joint press release with the U.S. govern- ment in response to the deaths of 14 Mexican migrants in Arizona in May 2001 stated, “Both gov- ernments have begun an investi- gation to identify the smugglers re- sponsible for this tragedy, and pledge close cooperation to find these criminals and bring them to justice. The governments . . . con- demn the actions of smugglers who put the lives of would-be migrants at risk” (Governments of the United States and Mexico, 2001). Echoing this perspective, the United Nations similarly focuses on smugglers in assigning blame for migrant deaths (UNCHR, 2002). Given that such boundaries and their associated practices are inher- ent to the modern state, it is not surprising that officials of national governments (or their collective expressions, such as the United Nations) do not call into ques- tion—even indirectly—the right to regulate national territorial boundaries. Those outside formal state structures, however, have the 176 MIGRACIONES INTERNACIONALES space to offer far-reaching critiques. Indeed, numerous academics and migrant and human rights orga- nizations take a very different ap- proach: Rather than focusing their critical attention on smugglers, they concentrate on the enhanced boundary-enforcement strategy. These individuals and organiza- tions have blamed the strategy for the deaths. Generally, however, they also accept boundary and im- migration enforcement as a legiti- mate state activity. An article by Bill Ong Hing on Operation Gatekeeper’s “dark side,” for example, argues that the deaths that have taken place in the southern California border region since Gatekeeper’s implementation on October 1, 1994 “are the di- rect result of the philosophy of ‘control through deterrence’ em- bodied in Operation Gatekeeper. By closing off traditional corridors of entrance used by undocu- mented migrants, Operation Gatekeeper has pushed migrants into far more treacherous areas” (Hing, 2001:124). Similarly, a complaint submitted by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of southern California and the California Rural Legal Assis- tance Foundation (CRLAF) to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights contends, “The facts show that Operation Gate- keeper was designed to place mi- grants in mortal danger in order to deter their entry into the United States. The facts also reveal that hundreds of migrants have died as a result of Operation Gatekeeper along the California-Mexico bor- der” (ACLU and CRLAF, 2001:1). For these analysts, the solution to the growing migrant death toll is the discontinuation of the enhanced enforcement strategy—one, they argue, that violates international law because it puts migrants in deadly peril—of which Gatekeeper is the most high-profile and lethal component. What this means in a practical sense is not clear as the authors do not put forth an explicit outline of what they think a more humane b o u n d a r y - e n f o r c e m e n t s t r a t - egy—one consistent with interna- tional law—would look like. The lack of clarity is compounded by the fact that Gatekeeper and simi- lar operations are not temporary endeavors. They are now institu- tionalized, having become the nor- mal method of boundary enforce- ment. As such, ending Operation Gatekeeper-like practices could mean—among other things—a reduction in the number of Bor- der Patrol agents in the Southwest and dismantling of scores of miles of walls and fencing. This, of course, would make the boundary easier to cross for would-be unau- thorized immigrants. However, it is far from clear that the overall impact in terms of the number of unauthorized entries would be sig- nificant as there is no conclusive proof that the boundary buildup has significantly reduced the num- ber of entries. An August 2001 report by the U.S. Government’s NOTA CRÍTICA 177 General Accounting Office de- clared that, although the new strategy has caused a discernible shift of unauthorized migrant traf- fic away from urban areas, it “re- mains unclear” the extent to which the strategy “may have affected overall illegal entry along the Southwest border” (U.S. GAO, 2001:2). A more recent study by the Public Policy Institute of Cali- fornia established similar findings (Reyes et al., 2002). Thus, Hing (2001:163) argues, “Reverting to pre-Gatekeeper enforcement strat- egies would be no less effective, in terms of apprehensions and deter- rence, but would result in far fewer deaths. The less dangerous routes to entry would be re-opened and the need for high-priced smugglers reduced.” How many fewer deaths would result were the enhanced bound- ary-enforcement strategy to end is a matter of debate. In their authori- tative study on migrant deaths, Karl Esbach, Jacqueline Hagan, and Néstor Rodríguez argue that it is not boundary enforcement per se that causes deaths. Rather, it is the policies behind the enforce- ment “that ultimately determines the migrants’ mode of entry” and thus the levels of risk that migrants face. In this regard, these authors would seem to agree that the cur- rent strategy is an important fac- tor in the deaths since late 1994. However, it is too simple, they ar- gue, to say that the current bound- ary-enforcement strategy is respon- sible for migrant deaths, as fatalities were occurring before the bound- ary buildup. In that regard, the authors contend that “migrant border deaths will continue to par- allel the temporal and spatial con- tours of undocumented immigra- tion.” They will only cease to occur if there is “a completely controlled border or the emergence of home- country economies as or more pros- perous than the United States.” And discontinuing intensified boundary enforcement—the cur- rent regime—does not make sense, as it “will only mean the return of migrant border deaths to earlier patterns, not the disappearance of death” (Esbach et al., 2002:iii). The University of Houston re- searchers are undoubtedly correct. Indeed, their study—and past ex- perience—suggest that the number of immigrant deaths could still be quite high if the federal government were to revert to the pre-1994 boundary-enforcement strategy. Whereas Hing (explicitly) and the ACLU/CRLAF (implicitly, by default) suggest a return to the pre-Clinton boundary-enforcement regime and, thus, a situation that would still lead to a large numbers of deaths, Esbach, Hagan, and Rodríguez (2001:64- 65) see the need to focus on long- term solutions and, in the short- and medium-terms, a program that al- lows for greater numbers of legal im- migrants: The long-term solution . . . lies in re- ducing the demand for undocu- mented entry . . . by reducing the sharp differences in the efficiencies of the 178 MIGRACIONES INTERNACIONALES economies of neighboring countries. In the meantime, the most promising policy solutions . . . are those that ac- knowledge the persisting demand in the United States for Mexican labor. Programs that expand channels of le- gal migration will be the most effec- tive way to address the level of mi- grant mortality at the border, because they remove the migrants from the riv- ers, canals, ranches, and deserts, and put them back in the seats of the mo- tor coach and airplane. Hence, the authors present two long-term options: a completely controlled border—something they do not seem to think is a re- alistic possibility, but, neverthe- less, one that they mention—and some sort of economic develop- ment program that facilitates a significant reduction in socioeco- nomic insecurity within migrant- sending countries. As is the case with all the authors discussed, Esbach, Hagan, and Rodríguez limit their advocacy to remedial measures that either ex- plicitly or implicitly endorse boundary and immigration en- forcement. As a result, some po- tential solutions to the problem of migrant deaths are not even con- sidered. In this regard, what the various authors do not say about migrant deaths is, in a number of ways, at least as important as what they say. Taken together, their dis- course and silence are emblematic of particular worldviews, ones that draw upon and reinforce specific conceptions of space, human rights, and violence. Normalization of National Space Effective immigration and bound- ary enforcement are practices of recent origin in human history, ones tied to the rise of the modern territorial state. Until the twenti- eth century, state controls over the movement of peoples—with few exceptions—were relatively weak (Dowty, 1987; Harris, 2002; also see Torpey, 2000). The history of the U.S.-Mexico boundary and its associated enforcement practices reflect this. Immigration policing along the boundary only emerged in the 1880s, and the U.S. Border Patrol did not come into existence until 1924 (see Nevins, 2002c). Despite the recent appearance of these practices, the U.S. public at large accepts them, and many people actively demand them as a way of maintaining and enhanc- ing national territorial sovereignty. Thus, apart from the high num- bers of migrant deaths, the current boundary-enforcement regime (migrant deaths aside) is strikingly uncontroversial within the United States. This largely reflects a wide- spread perception that boundary control is a necessary endeavor of the state, one deserving of exten- sive resources. The presence of such sentiment has not always existed, however. Apart from relatively b r i e f m o m e n t s , Wa s h i n g t o n officialdom and the general pub- lic had scant interest in unautho- rized-immigration and boundary- control issues before the 1970s. The shift reflects, among other NOTA CRÍTICA 179 things, a normalization of bound- ary enforcement in the American politico-geographical imagination. It also represents a particular stage in the development of the United States as a nation-state, one in which, at least in terms of immi- gration, the U.S.-Mexico divide has increasingly shifted from a bor- der, a zone of gradual transition, to a boundary, a stark line of de- marcation—one that divides law, order, and prosperity from chaos, lawlessness, and poverty (Nevins, 2002c). Thus, for the vast major- ity of Americans—including Latinos (see Vila, 2000)—the wrongness of “illegal” immigration is beyond question, and there is, therefore, no reason to debate policies that aim to stop extra-legal immigration (Nevins, 2002c). Such opinion reflects an embrac- ing of national territorial sover- eignty and a rejection of those who challenge it by attempting to traverse national boundaries with- out authorization. This is because the “illegal alien” is someone who is officially out of place—in a space where she or he does not belong. The practice of territoriality—the effort to exert influence over people or other phenomena by asserting control over a defined geographic area—reinforces the designation of the unauthorized immigrant as “il- legal.” Territoriality helps to obfus- cate and normalize social relations between controller and controlled, and it displaces those relations onto the territory itself, thus reifying it and the power it em- bodies (Sack, 1986). Just as the boundary and its associated prac- tices and identities (such as citi- zen, “alien,” “legal,” and “illegal”) have become normal, so, too, have the migrant deaths, in that most people in the United States accept them as simply a fact of life, as a perhaps sad but acceptable out- come of the perceived necessity to enforce “our” boundaries. The authors discussed here help to reproduce this worldview by endorsing, explicitly or implicitly, the putative right of the U.S. gov- ernment to enforce its boundaries. Although they decry the deaths and criticize the boundary buildup for contributing to them, they help to legitimate boundary en- forcement overall. As Hing, for ex- ample, writes, “The issue... is not whether the United States has a right to control its border.” Nev- ertheless, this is not an uncondi- tional right, he stresses. “Rather, the issue is whether the United States has abused that right with a strategy designed to maximize the physical risks, thereby ensuring that hundreds of migrants would die.” In explaining himself, he goes on to point out that the United States government, in a response to the Inter-American Commis- sion on Human Rights, has argued that every state has a right to con- trol entry into its national territory and to take “effective and reasonable” [my emphasis] steps to deter un- lawful entries. Hing does not take issue with this position, but sug- gests that Gatekeeper does not con- 180 MIGRACIONES INTERNACIONALES stitute a “reasonable” practice, thus implying that it is the spe- cific manifestation of boundary policing embodied by Gatekee- per—not boundary enforcement in and of itself—which is illegiti- mate (2001:164-165). Along the same lines, the ACLU and CRLAF (2001:10) complaint states that “the United States has a right to protect its borders and implement an effective border policy,” but in trying to realize this putative right, “it must do so in a manner that minimizes the threat to life.” Thus, it seems that as long as the bound- ary-enforcement regime is “rea- s o n a b l e ” — w h i c h p r e s u m a b l y means that it does not lead to an e x c e s s i v e n u m b e r o f m i g r a n t deaths—boundary and immigra- tion enforcement is a legitimate state activity. The University of Houston team does not explicitly state that the federal government has a right to police its boundaries and to deter- mine who can enter its territory. However, they implicitly endorse this right when, in laying out their prescriptions for minimizing mi- grant deaths, they fail to mention ending boundary enforcement as it relates to immigration. Mean- while, they bring up the possibil- ity of a completely controlled boundary as an option, although they quickly dismiss it as some- thing unattainable (see Esbach et al., 2001). However, by putting forth that option, while not offer- ing the opposite, they reinforce the perception that boundary en- forcement is a rightful practice of the state. Boundary control—in addition to being a politico-legal matter— is a moral one. In his article on mi- grant deaths, Wayne Cornelius raises the issue of morality. “Not just the efficacy,” Cornelius writes, “but the morality of a strategy of immigration control that deliber- ately [my emphasis] places people in harm’s way should be debated.” However, Cornelius (2001:681) comes to this conclusion after sug- gesting that boundary enforce- ment can only work as a tool of immigration control in the un- likely situation that there is suffi- cient “political will in Congress and the society as a whole to do what is necessary to strengthen enforce- ment of immigration laws in the workplace.” Thus, to the extent that he raises moral questions about the current strategy, Cor- nelius—in a manner similar to Hing (2001)—only does so to the extent that it contributes to mi- grant deaths. Regardless of inten- tions, the effect of such writing is to legitimate boundary and immi- gration control—as long as it does not seem to lead deliberately to migrant deaths, as the current strategy allegedly does. Presum- ably, in terms of the well-being of unauthorized immigrants, Cor- nelius would also find morally un- acceptable other boundary- and immigration-enforcement out- comes. However, because he does not say anything about the moral- ity of immigration control and NOTA CRÍTICA 181 boundary policing per se, he en- dorses them by default. Indeed, he implicitly legitimates them when discussing workplace enforcement. Although human rights con- cerns seem to animate the writ- ings of most of the authors, it is striking how little they speak ex- plicitly of human rights. More- over, when they do, it is in a man- ner that restricts itself to a rather conservative reading of interna- tional human rights law. They thus say nothing about a right to free- dom of movement, whereas they all—explicitly or implicitly—en- dorse the right of the state to con- trol its boundaries and to determine who can enter national territory. In this regard, they subordinate the hu- man rights of migrants to a right claimed by the state. A Conservative Conception of Human Rights None of the international conven- tions on human rights explicitly states that human beings have a right to freedom of movement. Per- haps for this reason, some of the authors discussed here (Cornelius, 2001; Esbach et al., 2001; Reyes et al., 2001) do not utilize the con- cept of human rights in critiquing the enhanced boundary-enforce- ment strategy. Some of those who do employ the concept of human rights (Bustamante, 2001; and Hing, 2001) do so by referencing the approach of the ACLU/CRLAF (2001). In their complaint to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the two advocacy organizations draw on Article 1 of the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man, which states that “[e]very human being has the right to life, liberty, and the security of the person.” The ACLU/CRLAF document argues that the U.S. government violates this article because the current bound- ary-enforcement strategy “is inten- tionally designed to place migrants in mortal danger” (ACLU and CRLAF, 2001:10). Thus, it seems that a boundary-enforcement strategy consistent with human rights would not place migrants in po- tentially deadly sit- uations. How- ever, given that migrant deaths precede were occurring before the implementation of the current strategy, it is hard to imagine a se- rious boundary policing strategy that would not place migrants, at least those trying to beat the en- forcement web, in mortal danger. That said, states can and do regu- late immigration by other means than just territorial-boundary po- licing. A state could, for example, intensively police residential areas and workplaces, thus greatly lim- iting the ability of unauthorized migrants to exist within national space. That approach would seem to flow from Jorge Bustamante’s statement that he is not suggest- ing “that a sovereign right of a country to determine who should enter and who should not is a source of violations of human rights” (2002:344). In asserting 182 MIGRACIONES INTERNACIONALES that, Bustamante echoes a founda- tional assumption of the ACLU/CRLAF position. That assumption, along with the nature of the ACLU/CRLAF critique of the current boundary- enforcement strategy, are manifes- tations of a conservative notion of what constitutes human rights or, at the very least, of a failure to push the limits of mainstream concep- tions of those rights. Clearly, a profound contradiction exists between what is virtually an unlimited right of states to regulate immigration and the universality of human rights as expressed by vari- ous international conventions and declarations (see Curtotti 2002). In addition to Article 1 of the Ameri- can Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man, various articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) are relevant to the rights of migrants: Article 1. All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with rea- son and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. Article 3. Everyone has the right to life, liberty, and security of person. Article 23. (1) Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of em- ployment, to just and favourable conditions of work, and to protec- tion against unemployment. (3) Ev- eryone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration en- suring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection. Article 25. (1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family. . . . Article 28. Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized. There are similar articles in a va- riety of international human rights covenants, but, again, none of them speaks explicitly about inter- national freedom of movement. Article 13 (2) of the UDHR, how- ever, does state that “Everyone has the right to leave any country, in- cluding his own, and to return to his country.” Although one can argue that this right implies the freedom to enter any country—as the right to leave a country is mean- ingless without a corresponding right to enter another—this is clearly not what the architects of the declaration intended. Never- theless, Article 28 obligates us not only to focus on clearly defined rights but also to concern ourselves with what is necessary to achieve the rights enumerated in the UDHR. Given the gross socioeconomic dis- parities and profound socioeco- nomic insecurity that plague many countries, the right to freedom of movement is necessary to achieve some of the rights quoted above. How, for example, can one have a right to work, to free choice of em- ployment, if one does not have mobility (in a legal sense) (see Harris, 2002)? And how meaning- ful is a right to an adequate stan- dard of living if one does not have NOTA CRÍTICA 183 the right, through movement across space, to access the resources needed to realize that standard? By not addressing the contradiction between the human rights it es- pouses and the putative right of states to regulate immigration, the international human rights regime reproduces social injustice. A recent report on the U.S.- Mexico border, by the Special Rap- porteur on the Human Rights of Migrants of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, reflects this contradiction. The report’s author, Gabriela Rodríguez Pizarro, emphasizes the right of the United States to regulate its boundaries, while recognizing mi- grant deaths as a problem. She thus suggests that the current boundary-enforcement regime must do more to ensure respect for the right to life. However, the mea- sures she champions do not in- clude a weakening of the bound- ary-enforcement web, as suggested by the ACLU/CRLAF (2001) and Hing (2001). Instead, she merely advo- cates measures that have already proven to be largely ineffective: the dissemination of information to would-be migrants about the dan- gers of crossing; search-and-res- cue missions; placement of wa- ter tanks in the desert; and efforts to combat smuggling rings (UNHCR, 2002). Amnesty International takes a position that is even more conser- vative than that of the United Na- tions. In a 1998 report, Amnesty states that it “does not take issue with the sovereign right of the United States to police its interna- tional borders in order to deter- mine whether individuals have the legal right to enter the country.” However, the organization contin- ues, Washington “must do so in a manner which complies with its international human rights obliga- tions” (Amnesty International, 1998:1). In discussing those hu- man rights obligations, however, Amnesty displays a narrow per- spective on what constitutes hu- man rights as they relate to migrant deaths. It does so by default: In its 50-page report, the world’s pre- mier nongovernmental human rights organization does not dis- cuss migrant deaths at all. It does concern itself with physical injury to unauthorized migrants, but it does so only when the direct ac- tions of individual boundary-en- forcement authorities (for example, beatings and shootings of mi- grants) cause it. In focusing on that rather than critically scruti- nizing migrant deaths that occur in attempting to elude a bound- ary-enforcement regime, Amnesty International is employing a par- ticular conception of violence. Narrow Notion of Violence Johan Galtung (1969) argues for an expanded conceptualization of violence, contending that we should concern ourselves primarily with outcomes, not means. In this regard, social practices (individual, 184 MIGRACIONES INTERNACIONALES collective, and institutionalized) that harm humans constitute vio- lence. Thus, Galtung defines vio- lence in part as that which prevents us from achieving realizable social goals deemed by most to be desir- able (for example, a healthy diet, access to potable water, or adequate health care and housing for all). When an identifiable actor com- mits the violence, it is direct or per- sonal in terms of its origins. When there is no actor present—or when an undesirable or unjust outcome arises from seemingly acceptable, institutionalized practices of “le- gitimate” organizations (such as the state)—the violence is indirect or structural. Although neither type of violence is inherently worse (we can only judge the significance of a particular type of violence in a specific context), we tend to focus our outrage on direct or personal violence because it is visible as ac- tion. We put far less emphasis on structural violence. Because of the lack of obvious actors, structural violence is often hidden, or it seems “natural”—a part of our normal surroundings. The lack of visible agency for the human suffering that results from structural vio- lence usually means that it goes unnoticed and unchallenged. In the case of such violence, not only do we often not see its causes, it i s not even visible as violence (Galtung, 1969; Nevins, 2002b). Violence pervades the lives of immigrants who have crossed the U.S.-Mexico boundary without authorization. From the physical attacks many of them experi- ence—either from so-called border bandits and unscrupulous smug- glers, or from state authorities (on both sides of the boundary)—to the poverty that many face due to low wages and an inability to ac- cess many public services, large numbers of unauthorized immi- grants in the United States encoun- ter violence (broadly defined) on a regular basis. Migrant deaths due to having to traverse dangerous terrain to elude the boundary-enforcement web are the most tragic example of this hid- den violence. Although a number of the authors critiqued here im- plicitly recognize that the current boundary-enforcement regime is an example of structural violence, this recognition is insufficiently structural as it limits itself to a manifestation of boundary enforce- ment (in the form of operations like Gatekeeper), rather than boundary enforcement in and of itself. Recent migrant deaths are not merely illustrative of the vio- lence of the current boundary-en- forcement regime but of bound- ary-enforcement in general—that is, if we accept Galtung’s conten- tion that we must expand our no- tion of the concept to include what prevents the achieving of realizable social goals deemed by most to be desirable and if we recognize hu- man rights covenants and declara- tions as examples of such social goals. Thus, what denies human rights, or, more specifically, the means to realize these rights (in this NOTA CRÍTICA 185 case, freedom of movement) is an example of violence. The principal perpetrators of the violence are the state actors who, under the rubric of the law, construct and enforce the territorial and politico-legal boundaries that unauthorized im- migrants must overcome, often at great personal risk. The intentions of these actors are not important—especially if we ac- cept the premise that one is respon- sible for the likely or predictable consequences of one’s actions. It is too simple to suggest that migrant deaths that take place in the con- text of trying to elude boundary enforcement are accidents, or even surprises. Although specific deaths or the exact number of fatalities in the growing tally are not predict- able, large numbers of deaths as a collectivity are foreseeable: They are destined to happen due to structures and actions of violence that are not seen as violence. Hence, in thinking about violence, we should focus on outcomes and consequences—especially those that are predictable—rather than concerning ourselves with means. If we do this, we realize that a death caused by a bullet is not morally more reprehensible than one caused by practices and social structures, such as those embod- ied by the U.S.-Mexico boundary- enforcement regime. As discussed earlier, the conven- tion is to focus on violence of a di- rect or personal nature and to con- centrate far less on institutionalized or structural forms. In many ways, this is not surprising as personal or direct violence shows. It disturbs the normal environment, whereas struc- tural violence is the normal environ- ment—at least in part. That said, structural violence can become vis- ible in a highly dynamic society, one in which political forces are effectively challenging dominant ideas of what constitutes violence and nonviolence (Galtung, 1969). Hence, academ- ics, researchers, and migrant-rights advocates concerned with migrant deaths must challenge boundary enforcement itself—especially if the goal is to embrace unauthorized migrants as human beings endowed with a full set of basic and universal rights. Conclusion The contemporary situation in the U.S.-Mexico border region is one in which both the unauthorized movement (northward) of people across the international boundary and efforts to stop them have never been greater. It is at this intersec- tion that the growing number of migrant deaths is taking place. However, migrant deaths are not of recent origin. They preceded the implementation of the current boundary-enforcement regime, and this fact exposes boundary en- forcement as being the factor, in and of itself, that puts unautho- rized migrants in mortal danger. That migrant deaths have in- creased in the context of the cur- rent intensified enforcement re- gime only suggests that “thicker” 186 MIGRACIONES INTERNACIONALES enforcement creates greater risks for unauthorized crossers—a quan- titative difference, albeit one of dis- graceful proportions, not a quali- tative one. Thus, if the goal is stop migrant deaths, calls to end enhanced en- forcement are not sufficient. Im- plicit in such calls is that bound- ary enforcement, if it is to occur, should not put migrants in mor- tal danger—at least, not to the ex- tent that it does currently. Hence, those who criticize the new strat- egy for reasons of heightened mi- grant fatalities implicitly allow as a potential solution a radical in- crease in resources dedicated to boundary enforcement—the idea being that one could make the en- forcement web so effective that mi- grants could not cross the bound- ary without authorization and put themselves in harm’s way trying to do so. Given the intense socioeco- nomic links—especially those as- sociated with the burgeoning cross- boundary commercial ties—such an intensification of enforcement would be politically difficult (if not impossible) to realize, however (see Andreas, 2001; Nevins, 2002c). In any case, it is doubtful that the au- thors examined here would desire a radical intensification of bound- ary enforcement to levels much higher than those that exist cur- rently. However, because they ex- plicitly or implicitly endorse the federal government’s right to en- force its territorial boundaries and only specifically challenge certain manifestations of boundary en- forcement, not the assumptions and practices underlying them, they do not preclude the possibil- ity of a substantial increase in boundary enforcement. Similarly, they do not forestall intense polic- ing in the interior as a substitute for boundary enforcement. As such, the writings and positions examined here reinforce a narrow conceptualization of human rights and justify the view that the right of the state to regulate immigration is greater than the human rights of noncitizens. Thus, human rights— including the right to an adequate standard of living and the right to work—are effectively accorded sec- ond-class status. In arguing this, I acknowledge that a right to freedom of movement might collide with other rights—most importantly that of societies to secure public order and the general welfare.3 But if we understand transboundary freedom of movement to be a basic human right as opposed to a privilege ac- corded by states, it forces us to ar- rive at solutions to problems associ- ated with in-migration (for the receiving society) other than those that erect obstacles to freedom of movement. Such solutions are pos- sible if the politico-geographical vi- sion and will exist. 3 Article 29 (2) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states, “In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order, and the general welfare in a democratic society.” NOTA CRÍTICA 187 That said, some or all of the au- thors critiqued here might have rea- sons for not wanting to challenge the global status quo that divides the world into nominally sovereign ter- ritorial states that have the right to determine who can enter and reside within their boundaries. However, because none makes efforts to explain and defend their explicit or implicit support for the state’s right to regu- late territorial boundaries and im- migration, their positions are not evi- dent. 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