Anomaly as Political Threat: Undocumented Mexicans in the United States
Tamar Diana Wilson
Research Affiliate, University of Missouri-St.Louis
2004 (April). Anomaly as Political Threat: Undocumented Mexicans in the United States. Paper presented at the spring meeting of the Society for Cultural Anthropology, Portland, Oregon (April 30-May 1).
Abstract:
The search for order and meaning are found in the cultural prescriptions of non-complex societies as well as in the standardizing, classifying and categorizing activities of the “high modernist” state. Anomaly, ambiguity and contradiction are common phenomenon, challenging any existing order, and both small societies and advanced industrialized countries attempt to annul them through ritualistic actions and pronouncements which often have material consequences. Undocumented workers are considered anomalous, polluting to the political-legal ordering of the state. They also occupy a contradictory position: valued as labor commodities, they are despised for their illegal entry and anomalous status within the receiving state. Their presence, and their deaths on crossing the border is often nomized by ritual pronouncements that can lead to changes in immigration laws. External events, however, can cause reversals in movement toward humanitarian immigration reform.
Keywords:
undocumented immigration, U.S.-Mexican border, Arizona desert deaths, anomaly, ritual
Biographical note:
Tamar Diana Wilson is a Research Affiliate with the University of Missouri-St. Louis. She has published on Mexican immigration in Urban Anthropology, Critique of Anthropology, Human Organization, Latin American Perspectives, Review of Radical Political Economics, and Journal of Borderlands Studies.
Anomaly as Political Threat: Undocumented Mexicans in the United States
Among the Lele, Mary Douglass (2000 (1966) tells us, women are treasured; but they are also despised. There is strong competition for women among Lele men; the practice of polygyny adds to their scarcity. Daughters are highly valued because through their marriages their fathers can ensure an entourage of sons-in-law whose labor and services the fathers can utilize. Much is made of little girls. Yet, though women are valued, they are also abhorred for the manipulations that their powerful position permits them. Women are almost like chess pieces of male power. But because of the preciousness they also have to power to manage men to their own advantage. Their manipulations challenge the social order. Their position is a contradictory one. “Although in some contexts they [Lele men] thought of women as desirable treasures, they spoke of them also as worthless, worse than dogs, unmannerly, ignorant, fickle, unreliable” (Douglas, 2000: 15). Thus, images of women were contradictory. They were despised and reviled because they managed to escape male control.
In a similar way, undocumented immigrants are valued but despised. They are valued as labor-commodities but reviled because of their politico-legal status. Elsewhere I have explored the economic value of undocumented workers to the U.S. economy (Wilson, 1999; 2000). Here I will concentrate on the politically anomalous status of undocumented immigrants which challenges the ordering capabilities of what Scott (1998), following Harvey (1989) has called the “high modernist” state. Although precious to those who employ them in the sense that their superexploitation helps to generate profits, the undocumented are not as powerful as Lele women. But their unregistered border-crossing challenges the power of the state. Because they are valued as labor commodities, they escape state regularization of immigration.
Scott argues that statescraft in early modern Europe was concerned with standardization, making legible illegible practices, and with manipulability: simplification of chaotic local practices in the interests of increased control.
Suddenly, processes as disparate as the creation of permanent last names, the standardization of weights and measures, the establishment of cadastral surveys and population registers, the invention of freehold tenure, the standardization of language and legal discourse, the design of cities, and the organization of transportation seemed comprehensible as attempts at legibility and simplification. In each case, officials took exceptionally complex, illegible, and local social practices, such as land tenure customs or naming customs, and created a standard grid whereby it could be centrally recorded and monitored (Scott, 1998: 2).
Such registration, simplification and monitoring fed into the power of the state both to raise taxes and conscripts and to provide public health and welfare programs. State power came to rest on classification and the standardization of categories which could be manipulated to generate knowledge, surveyed (in both senses of the term), administered and disciplined as Foucault (1995 (1977)) also shows. Yet local practices often differ from the order purportedly imposed by the state (Scott, 1998: 49).
The undocumented worker as a challenge to order
Undocumented immigrants challenge state classifications and standardizations in a number of ways. They are not captured on what Scott (1998: 82) has called the “administrative grid”: they escape governmental censuses; they are unavailable for conscription lists; it is unknown which of them pay taxes and how much their contributions are. They often do not speak the language of the host state. They cross borders without being registered or perhaps even qualifying according to extant immigration laws. They are a mobile population, often taking part in migrant farmworker streams. They will travel to where they have network members, who may be spread out over localities in several states. This network-mediated migration constitutes their local practice par excellence (Wilson, 1998, 2006).
Such mobility across borders challenges the sedentarization drive of the state, noted by both Scott (1998: 1) and Foucault (1995: 218). The sedentarization of mobile populations, from nomads and Gypsies to the homeless and vagabond has always been, according to Scott, an aim of the state. It is part of the disciplining of society, a fixing of populations, according to Foucault. The ineffectively restrained flows of undocumented immigrants across what is imagined as a fixed border held to be sacrosanct, its presence inscribed on official maps supposedly recognized worldwide, actively contests this sedentarization drive.
The undocumented generally, but with exceptions, escape tax and conscription lists, thus eluding state projects. Although many pay taxes, some evade this burden1; their non-existence for the state, their illegibility in Scott’s terminology, makes it impossible to prosecute those who do not pay. Some use false names, false security cards (thus losing the benefit of taxes they do pay); false identification cards, confounding the legibility of this population for the state. Because they are unidentified they cannot be sanctioned for not paying taxes or registering for any kind of draft, as can citizens and the legally resident. They are essentially people without patronyms, an anathema to state accounting (Scott, 1998: 64-71).
They are also, in Michael Kearney’s (1996) terminology “polybians,” denizens of multiple economic niches on both sides of the border, defiant of state simplifications, classifications and standardizations. Perhaps of peasant origins they may alternate between farmwork and factory work in the United States, be employed in the formal sector or the informal sector, either sequentially or concurrently. For its accounting purposes the state attempts to impose unitary definitions on individuals: the undocumented polybian subverts this unitary identity, of value only as a synchronic snapshot rather than a diachronic life history. Thus, “the polybian, by migrating without documents across social categorical borders, defies the documenting power of the state to impose unitary identities” (Kearney, 1996: 142).
The administrative grid imagined and mapped and perpetuated by officials of the state cannot capture the chaos of undocumented immigrants from a variety of countries (besides Mexico, also from Central America, South America, Asia and more recently, Eastern Europe) entering across the U.S.-Mexican border without passing through the nomizing regulations of immigration legislation. The state thus treats them as polluting, as “dirt” in Mary Douglas’ (2000 (1966)) sense of matter out of place, as challenging order, as anomalous persons or events, and attempts to rid itself of them and halt their inward flow.
Because immigration laws oversimplify in the face of polybian labor and refugee flows, and more recently in the face of globalization, they must be constantly amended, reissued, challenged and reinterpreted in the courts, changed. Thus a given law becomes more and more involuted and intricate until another, newer law attempts to simplify and standardize again.
As Scott tells us, local practices constantly contest the administrative grid of the state. If the agri-businesses, factories, foundries, restaurants, race traces, poultry farms, car washes, hotels and more which hire the undocumented are considered as localities within the general capitalist field, localities with their own customs concerning hiring a labor practices, sometimes manipulating the law in the interests of profit-making, they can be seen as defying the simplifying policies of the high-modernist state. They will hire the cheapest, most vulnerable labor, the undocumented, stepping around the provisions that make it illegal to hire such labor.
But local too are the networks of Mexican immigrants that crisscrossed the border established at its present latitude in 1848, and remaining essentially open until the Immigration Law of 1924. Such networks, always expanding to incorporate new personnel and geographic locales (Wilson, 1998), have knitted together Mexican populations in Mexico and the United States for more than a century.
The control of undocumented immigration, rather than serving the material needs of the state--although the argument against the undocumented is often couched in terms of their utilizing public services--serves, rather, the ideological needs of legitimating the state as a purportedly sovereign, thus encapsulating, entity responsible to and for only its citizens and legally admitted populations. Control of the non-sedentarized undocumented is often conceived of, at least in public rhetoric, as a matter of state security, however: the coordinates and numbers of these “illegible” populations remain unknown, hence threatening to the ordering, disciplining propensities of the state. Confusions are proliferated in the wake of this threat to control: the same forces used to halt smuggling of drugs are deployed against the smuggling of people. An impermeable border is heralded as the means to halt narcotics and people trafficking in the same breath (Andreas, 2000). Both kinds of trafficking become a “deviance” which threatens state power and its ability to maintain order. They are “deviances” which are too commonly linked together, with visions of each undocumented worker carrying kilos of marijuana or cocaine in his/her pockets on in a backpack, as s/he crosses the border.
Rituals of Order
High modernism, following Scott, is a qualitatively new attempt to impose order in the interests of enhancing state capacity. The maintenance of order through standardization and classification became part of the epistemology of the state. Knowledge generation was based on this classificatory, ordering method as well, from physics and biology to anthropology and sociology. Yet the desire to impose order, to nomize one’s surroundings, one’s conceptual and material world, is found from band and tribal societies to the modern state. Berger (1990 (1967): 22) argues that there is “a human craving for meaning that seems to have the force of instinct. Men [sic] are congenitally compelled to impose a meaningful order upon reality.” Hence the great religions and the embracings of ideologies that nomize, impose meaning and order upon an otherwise chaotic world. But notably, this meaningful order differs from society to society, by sub-society within a society, and over historical time. The myth of the “nation”-state is a common contemporary ordering, but constantly under siege by non-ordered events occurring both within and without its borders. Such chaos rests on the constant generation of anomaly in any system of classifications (Douglas, 2000: 40) accompanied by systemic contradictions such as those found in the Lele gender order.
Cultural provisions for dealing with ambiguous and anomalous events are similar both at the level of simple societies and complex, industrialized ones, suggesting that, as Berger holds, the quest for meaning (but meaning within a diversity of assumptions) is congenital. Nonetheless, the power to impose order increases with the power of the governing apparatus and the development of the administrative grid.
High modernism differs from early nomizations due to the scientific logic it pretends to impose. But the ritualistic actions of high modern states are similar to the ritualistic actions of band and tribal societies in their efforts to remove anomaly, ambiguity, and contradiction. Mary Douglas outlines five strategies/rituals employed to combat anomaly, polluting to order, in small societies. I will repeat them here, and show how governmental actions/policies concerning the undocumented are similar.
1.“First, by settling for one or another interpretations, ambiguity is often reduced” (Douglas, 2000: 40).As concerns the undocumented, ambiguity is (temporarily) reduced in a number of ways. Any foreigner not in possession of a tourist visa, a residence visa, or a green card, can be deported. Drug and people smuggling are conflated in order to emphasize the need for combat efforts along a semi-impermeable border. Andreas (2000) and Dunn (1996) both show how the militarization of the border, often justified in terms of drug control, is also directed toward control of immigration flows. Instead of using ever increasing economic interdependence to explain the continuance of undocumented immigration through remote areas, where many die in the deserts and rivers, the media blames the smugglers and corrupt Mexican immigration officials for these deaths. “Another interpretation” can be seen in the debates about cut-off dates for past and possibly future amnesty programs. Notably, in a complex society all interpretations and proposals are subject to debate; all are subject to contestations to such an extent that sometimes a new order of meaning emerges at a particular conjuncture, which also becomes subject to (re)interpretation, and generates its own anomalies and contradictions. Thus while ambiguity may be reduced in a certain time-slot, it may (usually will) reappear, perhaps in a different guise, as time passes.
2.“Second, the existence of an anomaly can be physically controlled” (Douglas, 2000: 40). For example, the militarization of the border, increasing the number of border patrol agents, adding the number of helicopters and sensors and infra-red telescopes, building more and longer walls, are efforts to physically control the over-the-border flow of people.
3.“Third, a rule of avoiding anomalous things affirms and strengthens the definitions to which they do not conform” (Douglas, 2000: 40). For example, rules requiring employers to check identifying documents, and specifying which documents are to be checked, when hiring Spanish-speaking and other marked foreign workers. And in the same vein, and with the same Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, sanctioning employers who have hired undocumented workers after a specific cut-off date. Or denying undocumented immigrants (as well as legal immigrants) certain public benefits, as the 1996 Immigration and Nationality Act and the 1996 Welfare Reform Act stipulate. These incorporate provisions for the avoidance of anomalous things (the undocumented immigrant) that strengthens the category to which they do not conform: that of citizenship. Such legislation marginalizes even more an already politico-legal marginalized group.
4.“Fourth, anomalous events can be labeled as dangerous” (Douglas, 2000: 40). Thus there are references to the “alien invasion;” speculations as to the number of criminals among the undocumented; claims that the undocumented are draining public resources rather than contributing to the economy; suggestions that they are migrating with the primary goal of tapping into these public benefits; arguments that they consume more fiscal resources than they replace by their payment of taxes. As potential criminals or consumers of public resources they are “dangerous” to society. Right wing groups label them as criminals in the first instance because they crossed they border without securing documents which would make their presence legal. Hence other forms of criminality, such groups imply, can be expected of the undocumented. They are held to be criminally inclined simply for having crossed the border clandestinely. Metaphors found in mainstream media such as the Los Angeles TImes as well as by anti-immigrant public spokespeople marginalize immigrants and scapegoat them as criminals, aliens, objects and “the enemy” among other demeaning characterizations (Santa Ana, 2002).
5.“Fifth, ambiguous symbols can be used in ritual for the same ends as they are used in poetry and mythology, to enrich meaning or to call attention to other levels of existence” (Douglas, 2000: 40). The meaning of citizenship may be held, in some liberal circles, to be enriched by the bestowal of amnesty on people viewed as hard workers who have contributed to the economy through their labor. Their politically anomalous status is cancelled through amnesty programs. Governmental officials or bodies can made symbolic, ritual gestures which, if successful, have material consequences for large numbers of people. Thus ex-president Fox of Mexico called for a new guestworker program, partially to gain support for his administration and political party from Mexicans residing in both Mexico and the United States. After a group 14 undocumented immigrants died in the Arizona desert (there had been deaths before, but in lesser numbers at one time), the media took part in ritual scapegoating of smugglers and of corrupt Mexican officials (see below). There was an underscoring of the “rescue efforts” engaged in by the United States Border Patrol (while looking for undocumented immigrants to deport). The mass media tended to stress the Border Patrol’s humanitarian efforts, noting that more Border Patrol agents and three more helicopters would be assigned to the sections where undocumented immigrants were dying in the desert in great numbers. These ritual efforts have material consequences for potential immigrants, both saving their lives in some cases and preventing their entry.