Over the course of the last few weeks, public opinion in the U.S. and the U.K. has ignited in relation to issues of gender, race, religion, and place of origin. However, a closer look at this recent turmoil suggests that there is a clear concern regarding global migrations, inter-genetic contact zones, and the presence of Muslim communities across Western nations. During the first presidential campaign of Donald Trump in 2016, I felt the academic urgency to focus on global migrations as places of conflict and political contact, and today in 2024 this urgency has acquired a more defined intellectual and cognitive pervasion than back then.
On the surface, anti-immigration in the U.K. and the presidential candidacy in the U.S. of a woman with multiple cultural heritages that self-identifies as an African-American are unrelated and respond to different cultural anxieties. Nevertheless, global social reality provides quite a different perspective, particularly because migrations across the globe are triggering mainstream rhetorical responses that appeal to both nativism and genomic anxieties. Furthermore, the recent social media attacks focused on athletes from Algeria and China competing at the Olympics have put into question the western cultural protocols of trans-inclusion at such a competitive and global level as it is the case of the Olympic Games.
While these sociocultural phenomena seem to underscore different biopolitical trajectories (cultural difference, intersectional power dynamics, and postmodern gender re-configurations), they share a common rhetorical point of encounter. The proliferation of global bordering processes at all biopolitical levels emphasizes that our realities of interaction impose more borders than ever upon human experience. Borders no longer are mere fixed invisible divisions set under geopolitical rationales whose main objective is defining national territorialities. Moreover, the circulation of global migrants across national borders and global urban spaces has shifted the interplay between humans and borders internally. Thus, borders are not only serving as external points of biopolitical entry, particularly as cities in Europe and North America (thinking solely about the Western hemisphere) are experiencing an administrative reconfiguration of public spaces, as street policing has incorporated violent exclusionary practices to further distinguish between those who seem to belong from those who fall under the migrant/other category. In addition, public services targeting migrants are strengthening the protocols of national belonging while also defining the routes that migrants endeavor with administrative purposes, such as obtaining transit, residency, and employment permits.
Borders no longer are mere fixed invisible divisions set under geopolitical rationales whose main objective is defining national territorialities.
Back in 2016, while teaching at a very conservative liberal arts institution in the southern United States, I made the risky decision to bring into the classroom The Origins of Nazi Violence by Enzo Traverso. Traverso’s monograph rightfully maps the conflicting genealogy of the Nazi regime, framing the extermination camps as an early epitome of European modernity’s industrialization of dehumanization and killing. The reading provoked a blitzkrieg of disapproval among my students. Despite my efforts to situate the reading within contemporary ethical debates, most of them argued that Traverso’s book was dated because Nazis had been already defeated and therefore that kind of “evil” had been successfully eradicated. I clearly remember my anxiety when one of my students angrily expressed that if Traverso’s book was at all useful it was only to place the role of Barack Obama as the main culprit for constantly fueling waves of anti-white racism across the United States. From this particular vantage point, the current attacks of Donald Trump on Kamala Harris’ heritage and racial origins are not at all unfamiliar among the American electorate. These attacks have a precise epistemological origin and are also sanctioned by entire communities. Moreover, these attacks aim at very specific social and cultural places of exclusion, similarly to what Traverso exposes in relation to the Nazi regime.
Nevertheless, while there is undoubtedly an epistemic entanglement between the emergence of anti-immigration and the rejection to acknowledge the biopolitical rights of migrants, the future keeps promising more global migrations and acute social mobility. In this specific sense, a paradigmatic example of this global phenomenon is the Central America-Mexico-U.S. human migration corridor. Over the course of this new century, a shift has occurred in relation to what at some point was identified as the ground-zero level of undocumented migrations to the United States. The once regarded as dangerous Arizona desert and Río Bravo/Colorado River irregular crossing points have been replaced by the treacherous Darién jungle, which stretches across southern Panama and northern Colombia. One of the consequences of this rebordering process is the sudden amplification of global migrations to North America—as borders play a crucial role in the allocation of human rights and the redistribution of cosmopolitan ethical concerns. While people from all over the world are crossing the Darién jungle on their way to Mexico and the United States, this sudden relocation of the entry point to North America has transformed Central America into a human corridor where entire families invest their futures. In consequence, this phenomenon has transformed in a short period of time the paradigm that once characterized migrants going to the U.S. as lonely men that were often considered outliers in their home countries.
This recent “expansion” of the U.S. national border across Mexico and Central America not only fulfills the American neocolonialist agenda but also demands an ongoing administration aimed at establishing protocols for the control of human mobility. In this specific sense, although departing from a philosophical standpoint, Thomas Nail suggests the term kinopolitics as an approach to understand global mobility. In The Figure of the Migrant, Nail advances the idea that the conceptual understanding of the kinopolitical figure of the migrant underscores the multiplicity and multidirectionality of a global character, “the migrant,” that has become central in the reconfiguration of geopolitical and biopolitical borders. Moreover, Nail’s Theory of the Border proposes that everyday life is bordered in every single direction, including the human body, our mindsets, and material life itself.
Nail’s theoretical approach to both the figure of the migrant and global borders has encouraged me to wonder about the incipient emergence of global identities that in the coming years will challenge the nation-based experiences of belonging. Not only transnational experiences will become more prevalent across global spaces but also the conservative approaches to racial nationhood will be challenged by new genomic configurations inherent to global mobility. The recent Venezuelan and Haitian diasporas are already transforming the urban landscapes of global spaces like Mexico City, which is regarded as the most populous city in North America. Similarly to the ongoing disinformation campaign on social media regarding non-U.S. citizens registered to vote in the upcoming November election, during the recent presidential election celebrated in Mexico on June 2 there were also public opinion concerns regarding the false claim that South American and Haitian immigrants had been given voting cards by the ruling party MORENA, which consequently won the presidential election.
Even though anti-immigration seems to be on the rise across deeply polarized nation-states, the furthering of neoliberal postmodernity across the Global South is paving manifold routes to endeavor global migration with the clear intention to relocate as close as possible to the Global North. After all, the invisible guiding force of neoliberal postmodernity is transforming subjective, objective, and symbolic space into a spatial puzzle that could be understood as a global borderspace. And this process of spatial configuration within the global realm has positioned mobility across borders as a fundamental starting point to both access and understand the future of (inter)national borders.
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