A Higher Law
An interview with Jason De Leon on the border, labor vs. security, and necropolitics.
An interview on immigration won’t surprise any of our readers. It’s a topic we circle, trying harder and harder to understand so that maybe a rational anecdote to cruel policy and absurd conversations about human movement can lift off.
These conversations can be dizzying – so much fact, so much DATA, so much anecdotal evidence, and yet still, so much perversion of the law.
This interview with Jason De Leon, Professor of Anthropology and Chicana/o Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, was conducted and condensed by Noelle Forougi for franknews.
Would you introduce yourself?
I am a professor of anthropology of Chicano and Central American Studies at the University of California Los Angeles. I'm also the executive director of the Undocumented Migration Project.
My motivation comes from a range of things. I grew up in an immigrant household. I spent part of my youth in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas, about eight miles from the border. I went back and forth from Mexico a lot as a kid. I grew up with undocumented family members. I had sort of always been interested in immigration issues for personal reasons.
As an academic, I spent the first 10 working as an archeologist in Latin America. During that work, I became exposed to issues around immigration in Mexico especially. My interest just started to evolve and, increasingly, I became less excited about the things that were coming out of the ground and more interested in the stories that people were telling me, especially the folks I worked with on excavation who were talking about the things that had happened to them in the Arizona Desert or people who were getting ready to migrate.
By the end of my dissertation, I decided to jump ship and see whether or not I could use these previous skills that I had developed, you know, as an archeologist to try to understand this contemporary, social phenomenon. Over the years that project has evolved into a million different directions, where now it’s forensic science, archeology, ethnography, exhibition work, and a whole range of other things. And so it's been kind of this ongoing process of I think, exploration for me in a lot of ways.
You mention how casual it was to cross the border growing up, versus the very militarized feeling that exists now. Could you talk about the political history of that? Why and when did the border change?
In the late nineties, when I was in high school, we would just cross the border to go to Mexico to party on the weekends or to get lunch. It wasn't a big deal. In those days, you would come back across, and if you had a driver's license or, even if you just told them you were American, you could come right back through. That really changed after 9/11. We saw a hardening of the US-Mexico border because of those events. Border patrol, which eventually became the Department of Homeland Security, started to conflate terrorism with undocumented migration for a variety of, in my opinion, political reasons.
If you talk to agents who signed up for the border patrol after 9/11, a lot of them would say that they thought they would be protecting the homeland from Osama bin Laden. That is what they were being pitched, when in fact we've never caught a terrorist crossing the US-Mexico border. If we had, everybody in this country would know that person's name. It would be on every anti-immigrant right-wing document out there. But, by conflating those two things, it became very easy then for Homeland Security and Customs and Border Protection to argue for these bloated budgets to spend all this money on security measures that really don't work.
There really was this kind of pivotal moment where, you know, migration was already starting to shift away from urban zones El Paso, San Diego in the mid to late nineties. But it wasn't until after 9/11 that you really saw this stuff really ramp up, and then suddenly you had to have a passport to go to Mexico. Folks who had been coming back and forth on a daily basis suddenly found themselves facing huge lines.
Right, and part of this is the policy of prevention through deterrence – essentially forcing people to migrate through deserts instead of through urban zones. To me, that really seems to serve the government and Border Patrol since they can kind of distance themselves from direct contact with the immigration crisis. Suddenly immigrant deaths are a consequence of geography, rather than a consequence of policy. Can you talk a little bit about how you think this policy has affected accountability?
I think that the two things that prevention through deterrence really did are, for one, it made this process practically invisible. It really pushed migration out into the middle of nowhere where you just don't see what's going on. And so now suddenly people have no understanding of what immigration really looks like or how many people are doing it. Out of sight, out of mind,
And two, this policy has literally killed thousands of people, and disappeared thousands of people, through the strategic weaponization of the desert. People are dying and disappearing, nobody can see it happening, and there is no accountability for the people who have set this policy in motion.
It is a perfect storm, from the perspective of law enforcement – they don't have to deal with the public outcry that would come from seeing people hopping a fence or seeing dead bodies. And then they can completely wipe their hands clean of any responsibility for the things that are happening out there, which I think is why this policy has continued to stay in place.
People just don't know about it. They're not seeing it. A big part of my work and my interest is trying to make those things visible. I feel like the only way people are going to be outraged by this stuff is if they have a better understanding of it. Literally on a daily basis people are dying because of a border patrol policy that is purposefully designed to put them in harm's way.
The media only focuses on the story of immigration when it's brought to a head in a very visual way. The way we talk about immigration seems really counterproductive to any change. Anything but prevention through deterrence is going to bring more people to our borders, and because politicians and the news talk about the border as some insane crisis, it seems no politician, even if they wanted to, would be able to dive in and think about deep reform. I mean, the fact Title 42 still exists feels like an obvious example of this.
The moments when immigration generates a national conversation is when there are images of a border patrol agent on a horse whipping a Haitian migrant, or a child in a blanket on the floor of a detention center. Obviously, these are moving and disturbing images, but this goes on every single day all day long. It shouldn't take one of those things to get us to think about this much bigger issue, but that is what captivates us. We have a very short attention span, which makes it really challenging to try to write an immigration story that includes a longer history.
I think it's a struggle to find new ways to present this stuff, but it's also a challenge that I kind of enjoy. I am finishing a book right now on human smugglers, and it's not a story about good guys and bad guys. It's not a story about these horrible people doing this horrible stuff and then people die. I'm trying to tell a different kind of story about this process that is incredibly complex.
Which is the same thing I tried to do with my first book. Is it a book about immigration? Is it a book about border policy? Or is it a book about a bunch of people and families that are impacted in different ways by migration? I always gravitate towards the stories and the narratives of individual people and families the most. Those are the things I find to be the most powerful. And then the question is, can I use those stories to zoom out and understand the larger problem?
I am curious about what you find to be the larger story or the larger problem as it relates to human smuggling.
I think people want it to be easy. When migrants die in the desert, when migrants die in the back of a truck in San Antonio, everybody blames smugglers. Migrants will blame smugglers. The American public will blame smugglers. The border patrol blames smugglers. And that's an easy thing to do. It becomes comprehensible if we have a boogieman that we can blame.
Of course when you lock someone in the back of a truck and lead them in the middle of the Texas sun, and they all die, of course, the smugglers are directly implicated in those deaths. But those smugglers don't fall out of the sky. These things don't happen in a political or economic vacuum.
For me, it has been really trying to trace the story of how does someone end up driving that truck? How does someone end up leading someone on the train tracks in Mexico? What I have found really hasn’t been surprising. The more we ramp up security and the more dangerous we make the migration, the greater the need for smugglers is. There is a feedback loop here. But, it confirmed to me that there is no stopping this process.
There's nothing you can do to stop human smuggling because it is so amorphous, it evolves so quickly. After seven years of this project, I couldn't lay out a strategy that says, “Okay, here's how you actually stop this thing.” There's just no way you can do it, but, of course, people will still try. My argument is that smuggling is not the problem. It's a symptom of a much larger problem. If we don't want people to die in the Arizona desert or in the back of a truck, we need to get at the root causes of why someone is in the back of a truck. We have to stop looking for these very simplistic answers.
Right. And also, the harder migration is, the more people stay, when in reality not everyone wants to live here. A lot of people want to make money and then go back to their families.
The bulk of people would prefer to be able to go back and forth. There is this idea that everybody's coming here for the American dream, but Americans think the American dream is moving here, becoming citizens, and suddenly finding happiness. I think the American dream for most migrants is to come here, make some money and be better off when they go back home to their families.
Obviously, there's no one solution to the immigration system, but are there any specific policies or practices that you would highlight as being important to look to?
Well, I think the easiest one is some kind of guest worker program where people can move back and forth. The problem with that is, we had one of these programs before and it was totally abused by the employers. It became a new form of slavery, a new form of indentured servitude. This type of program, if it were to be tried again, has to be well monitored so that it guarantees the rights and civil liberties of those who are coming here to work.
But, in many ways, that is a bandaid for this much bigger problem. I think the solution depends on if we are trying to solve a border security issue or if we are trying to solve a labor issue. Is it that we don't want people to come here in general, or do we want to figure out how people can come here and work so we can all benefit? That ends up being kind of two different questions.
A lot of people who are coming here would prefer to be able to make a living wage where they live. Or they want to just be safe. If we think about the drug war in Mexico, it's a drug war really being fought for Americans, right? I mean, we're the public who is consuming all those drugs. Our demand is fueling the violence that people are fleeing.
Also, the countries that are politically and economically unstable, especially in Central America, are that way largely due to the United States. Like, Honduras is the way it is in no small part because the United States, historically, had a hand in its political and economic structure. Some of those solutions to those issues really require coping with the fact that the US had a hand in the damage and thinking through how to repair it. The problem with that is when you tell the American public that, a subsection of the public doesn't want to help because they are under the impression that Honduras just is corrupt and it's Honduras's problem. El Salvador is a mess and that's El Salvador's problem. In order for us to address these problems, it also requires educating the public on why investing in those countries is then good for our own immigration system.
Yeah – we seem to have very short-term thinking and little sense of history.
We live in our own little worlds. Most people don't know where Honduras is, a lot of folks today don't remember the Cold War. We need the public to not just be smarter about these things, but really to be open to learning. Americans can be very hard-headed about these things. I used to think that education was the key, but not everybody wants to be educated. Some people will believe whatever they want to believe. That makes any kind of immigration reform, I think, really challenging.
Yeah, part of what we are told is the truth, and the stories politicians find politically expedient to tell. Republicans obviously thrive off fear. Democrats thrive off a story of sympathy and contrasting themselves to Donald Trump. Do you think, practically, that one party has actually been better than the other on immigration policies?
Democrats like to portray themselves as like the party of the people, as the pro-immigrant party, but Obama was the "Deporter in Chief" and prevention through deterrence was a Bill Clinton era policy. In many ways, I think that George W. Bush was more friendly to immigrants than either Clinton or Obama.
Trump has given the Democratic Party a straw man to compare themselves to. I mean, Democrats have been guilty of inaction since Biden was elected. We had all these promises about immigration reform that have not happened, but as long as babies aren't in cages and Biden's not calling Mexico a shit-hole country, it somehow feels like we're more immigrant-friendly.
In some ways, Democrats are a little bit more nefarious because they're hiding their indifference under different, more palatable language. As far as I'm concerned, I would throw them both under the bus. I don't care who is in the White House, whoever is in power right now is responsible for the deaths that prevention through deterrence causes. And under that framing, everybody's hands are dirty. Migrant death is a bipartisan issue.
You talk about necropolitics in the book, I feel like that sort of unites the policies, or lack thereof, between the two parties. Can you define necropolitics for our readers?
Necropolitics comes from an African theorist named Achille Mbembe. It refers to this notion that the state is deciding who lives and who dies. In many ways, I think that's characteristic of all modern nation-states – we hide behind the law to make these judgments about whose life is valuable and whose is not. Necropolitics is Guantanamo Bay. Necropolitics is the fact that thousands of migrants can die in the Arizona desert and nobody's accountable, nobody's in an uproar. Necropolitics is the fact that the state doesn't seem to have a problem with it, because those folks are undocumented, they're not our citizens.
We're getting to a point where laws and regulations are somehow more valuable than human life. When someone says that yes, migrants are dying in the desert, but maybe they shouldn't break the law, it is just astounding to me. I mean, throughout the history of human societies we have had a lot of laws that are incredibly unjust. We don't have to look that far back in American history to be like, well, that law is not the law, that is not how we should have been thinking about this.
I feel like if your law lets thousands of people die, maybe you should find a higher law for yourself.
I mean, think about the war on abortion. Who has power over their body? Whose life has more value? Well, now suddenly that is no longer up to the individual. The state gets to decide who lives and who dies. Necropolitics is not this thing that third-world countries do. We are living in a moment where we're seeing it play out here in a lot of ways — I just think we never frame it to Americans in a way that allows us to understand what is at stake.