I found this week’s readings interesting in the context of our discussion with Matthew Longo last week and his reference to the idea that people will go where the money is if the money does not go where the people are. The statement from economist Jean-Baptiste Say has an air of inevitability about it, as though it was a law of nature. The idea of migration being a force of nature is echoed in Taladrid\u2019s pieces that we read for this week. In the Taladrid, former Mexican Ambassador to the US Arturo Sarukh\u00e1n says that you \u2018can\u2019t enforce your way out of a migration crisis\u2019\u201d because the people and smugglers will simply find alternative routes. Indeed, as Lopez Obrador says, \u201cpeople don\u2019t willingly leave their own homes\u2026 they do it out of necessity.\u201d The US has committed funding to development in Central and South America, but US politicians are under pressure to solve the problem now, which means enforcement. As a result, the US government spends much more money on the federal agencies that enforce immigration laws and guard the border. They treat the symptoms, not the cause.<\/p>\n
Although I don\u2019t think the question was asked explicitly in Taladrid\u2019s piece, as I was reading, I asked myself whether the situation was sustainable. Moreover, if the situation were unsustainable, what would give out? Matthew Longo alluded to this last week, and I am inclined to agree: liberal democracy would give out. If the whac-a-mole of enforcement does not work, then many will see the immediate solution (the solution for the next election cycle) as a bigger hammer or a hammer wielded with less restraint. This is how we arrived at the \u201cmuseum of deterrence\u201d, that is, the wire, barriers, and blades on the Rio Grande, S.B.4, and Trump\u2019s plan to deport millions of migrants when he enters office.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I am also interested in performative action in migration policy. Specifically, I am interested in performative cruelty. Operation Wetback, as Burgess outlines, was largely performative in its outcome, even if its intention was substantive. The government claimed to have deported more than a million illegal immigrants, but the figures didn\u2019t add up. Moreover, many of these deportations were coercions to leave the country rather than legal deportations. Burgess also points to this evidence that US citizens were caught up in the operation. The purported success of Operation Wetback lay in the Bracero program, which provided an alternative route for migrants to migrate legally to work nine months a year on farms. But politically, Operation Wetback allowed Eisenhower to say that he was getting tough on illegal migration. We might note, however, that the performative action came at the cost of a chip on the rule of law in the US.<\/p>\n
It seems that creating safe routes for migration, does dissuade people from coming dangerously. In addition to the Bracero program, the parole program in certain South American countries that resulted in a 90% drop in irregular migration from those countries. Someone who supported Operation Wetback might say that there is a crucial difference between people coming legally and illegally, even if it results in the same de facto outcome. However, speaking from the UK, temporary migrant workers are just as much an \u201cother\u201d to be blamed in times of economic depression as irregular migrants. For example, after Brexit, a political event inspired in part by legal rather than illegal migration, farmers\u2019 crops rotted in fields because the seasonal workers from Romania and Poland could not come any more. If migration policy is purely motivated by racism, then that policy is a threat to liberal democracy and the economy of that country.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I found this week’s readings interesting in the context of our discussion with Matthew Longo last week and his reference to the idea that people will go where the money is if the money does not go where the people are. The statement from economist Jean-Baptiste Say has an air of inevitability about it, as<\/p>\n