All Politics Are Border Politics
An Interview with Kathleen Staudt on the myths and misconceptions of the border.
Kathleen (Kathy) Staudt, Ph.D. is a retired professor from UTEP. Her research spans borders, women/gender in international development, immigration, education, activism, and violence. Staudt has authored and edited twenty books, including Border Politics in a Global Era: Comparative Perspectives and Hope for Justice and Power: Broad-based organizing in the Texas Industrial Areas Foundation. We speak with Dr. Staudt about borders — both international and local — and how they shape the lives of those who live on them.
This interview was conducted and condensed by Tatti Ribeiro for franknews.
Thanks for taking the time today, do you mind starting by introducing yourself and your work?
My name is Kathleen Staudt. I am a retired professor, now Professor Emerita of Political Science at the University of Texas at El Paso, where I taught for 40 years. I got my Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin. I'm originally from Milwaukee.
I have traveled to many places, crossed many borderlands around the world. I taught courses on border politics, women and politics, public policy, democracy, and civic engagement. I've written 20 academic books. I have published over 150 articles and chapters in academic books.
Since I've retired, I realized how rarely people outside of academia read academic material <laugh>. So it's been a wake-up call about communicating. And now I'm very involved in community activism. I, with a couple of colleagues, wrote an evidence-based book called Who Rules El Paso: Private Gain, Public Policy, and the Community Interest. Lots of people have read that book and acted on its findings to promote policy change in El Paso.
You've lived in the borderland since 1977. I'm curious about how it's changed over time, particularly the day-to-day experience?
Well, I always think back to my job interview at the University of Texas at El Paso. I flew into El Paso in 1977 and was met by the chairperson at the airport gate (when that was still allowed!). We did a quick hop over the border to have lunch at Julio's, a wonderful restaurant in Ciudad Juarez, and then we quickly came back again. There was very little congestion; it was very easy to get back and forth across the border, whereas nowadays it is a chore and traumatizing for some. One encounters very rude officials in Customs and Border Protection who seem to assume the worst about travel to our sister city: why did you cross? What are you bringing? Take the US-Canada border: the Canadian officials are welcoming and greet a welcoming as one enters Canada; that is not the case in the central US-Mexico borderlands.
Actually, things worsened after September 11th of 2001 because it was assumed that all borders were subject to possible terrorist activity. In fact, every time I hear the word terrorist I am concerned because it is a much-overused word, used so much in the political process to turn people into haters. So, as border historian Oscar Martinez put it, it has always been an interdependent border, but it became an alienated border after 2001.
And then in 2008, US citizens had to get a passport to come back to the United States, even if they just went across the border to go shopping or eat at a restaurant. When I first came here we would cross the border every week. When the pandemic came, border crossing nearly ended, though U.S. citizens were allowed to cross back and forth, unlike most Mexican citizens. So-called “essential work” in Ciudad Juarez continued during the pandemic; that is to say, factory workers in the ~300 maquiladoras (three-fourths of which are owned by US corporations) continued to work. The products from low-cost labor crossed the border for U.S. consumers, but the ability for individuals to cross in a friendly and easy way continued to diminish.
What about your students or friends who do have to continue crossing back and forth? What is that experience like?
Well, business people can get a commuter lane pass. There are still a lot of corporate managers who live in El Paso and cross back and forth. It costs $300 or $400 a year, and requires a security check, but obviously, most ordinary people cannot afford that.
For the Mexican border students who cross to UT El Paso, there is a special visa that they can get.. Some children, born in the United States, live in Ciudad Juarez because the cost of living is much cheaper; they cross the border to study. And then there are Mexican student citizens, who come from Ciudad Juarez and who, thanks to the Texas legislature in the late 1980s, have been able to pay in-state Texas tuition under the PASE program (Programa de Asistencia Estudiantil (PASE). I don't think the current Texas legislature would've ever passed such a measure!
The traumatizing part of all this is that, depending on who is checking your documents, you might encounter officials who are very suspicious of you or just having a bad day. There's always the assumption that people are carrying illegal goods, drugs, or something like that. If crossers don't have the right kind of documents, they can be pulled over and be delayed for hours at a time by officials. They can even be subject to physical checks.
You write that all politics are border politics.
Yeah. Many of the major world tensions involve border conflicts. All you have to do is open up an issue of The Economist every week, and my bet is that the majority of articles about conflicts in the world have to do with border issues.
One aspect of border studies focuses on physical borders: where, historically, the question of where the borders got drawn and who and what are authorized to cross them. Take the Russia- Ukraine war for example; that comes down to the question of where the border should be drawn especially in eastern Ukraine. In fact, all of those old Soviet Republics that are now independent countries are facing a lot of challenges to existing borderlines. All these borderlines are man-made, politically through negotiation and conflict. And I say “man” because mostly it's men who are making these decisions..
Then there are also worries about what gets crossed on the border. The US and its trade policy welcomes low-cost goods produced by low-cost labor. Lots of concessions have been made to business people to ease the border crossing process; it’s easy for legal goods to cross, but harder for people to cross.
And then we can look at the borders inside a country. The US, a federal system, contains 50 states and 50 different laws on many different things, such as reproductive health. Currently, state border crossing is a key challenge for women to get comprehensive healthcare. It is frightening to hear about politicians pushing for checkpoints to ensure that pregnant people aren’t crossing for an abortion. The way that would stall or prohibit free movement in a country that cherishes freedom, or at least uses the rhetoric of freedom, is just amazing to imagine.
Within a state, there are various jurisdictions. For example, there are school districts and depending on where you fall within a border — again, mostly man-made borders – determines where your child goes to school. And then you can look to historical redlining practices to segregate people into housing among their own ethnicities. When the Interstate 10 freeway in El Paso was constructed in the 1950s, it essentially divided the city. It was expected that Mexican Americans would reside near the border, and middle-class or above Mexican Americans and Anglos, or whites, were supposed to live further north, away from the border. Bank lending policies and access to capital on these geographical divisions - solidified an invisible borderline. Every ten years, after the Census, we all face redistricting politics for congressional, state legislative, city and county districts. The demographics of who wins elections depend on where the border lines are drawn.
When I was thinking about the title of my book, Border Politics in a Global Era: Comparative Perspectives (2018), I considered naming it “all politics are border politics”, but I knew that such a title was too long and bulky <laugh> and over-generalized. A lot of conflicts — from local to state to national to international — have to do with territorial borders.
Do local politics have any effect on the physical territorial border that locals have to live with? Or is that a state or national issue?
So many of our city policies are impacted by international and national issues. Extensive trade between Mexico and the US exists in our central borderlands, along with the Pacific and south Texas borderlands. We have long been a key crossing point for migrants fleeing Central American civil wars and gang violence. And, of course, people from Mexico have also long crossed the border. The entire US southwest once was part of Mexico! Nowadays, we are the first city that migrants encounter and then move from.
And so, yeah, there's conflict within the city over how we welcome or don’t welcome migrants. Since 1980, Annunciation House has offered shelter to many migrants on their journey. In the last 10 years many in the faith community have actually been the ones to offer shelter and food for people who have been granted documents that allow them to legally travel to their relatives and wait for a hearing on asylum. My church, for example, has been part of that. The Catholic churches have also been very involved. Sacred Heart Church in South El Paso, which has been around for around 150 years, turned over much of its gym and cafeteria facilities into places where people could stay, lately, the Venezuelans.
Immigration and asylum policies have been changing so much that it is difficult for everyone except for immigration expert lawyers to have a handle on exactly who qualifies and how. A lot of migrants and refugees get stuck in Ciudad Juarez. And as much as our city and county have limited capability to shelter and feed temporary sojourners, Juarez has even more limitations on its capability. There just aren't the resources for people to be able to stay safely, partly because Juarez still has a serious crime problem. Many migrants will stay right near the border, even sleep on the bridge ports of entry, or sleep right at the bottom of the bridge, no matter the weather.
But our local city and county have stepped up. We have used some city resources to buy facilities that can house migrants, like some schools that no longer have enough students to justify keeping a whole school open. Lately, the feds offered reimbursement for sheltering migrants. Both the city and the county have special staff designated to help coordinate and collaborate to facilitate this process. Of course, it takes good people on the city council and county commissioners’ court to make those things happen. I always feel blessed to live in a city like El Paso, because among the 800,000 of us, many really understand the migration experience in a literal way. They have relatives and friends in Juarez or other parts of Mexico. Or they cross to see their grandma and grandpa, or have tried to cross for funerals.. El Pasoans have a level of understanding about migration that probably exceeds that of many others elsewhere in the US.
Do you think comprehensive immigration reform will ever be a priority again? For Democrats or Republicans?
In my opinion, especially for many “liberals” and progressives within the Democratic Party, there's been some disappointment with Biden's immigration policies (and outrage over previous Trump policies).
To some extent, Biden did humanize policy enforcement, no longer allowing family separation practices. Our region was the site of family separation practices.. In 2018, a huge camp in Tornillo near El Paso to hold children which thankfully closed with extensive coverage from the nation, but even now, there are hundreds of those children whose parents remain un-located after this Trump policy. Biden halted such practices, and Congress needs to act, but there's still a lack of clarity on asylum application procedures. Our Congresswoman Veronica Escobar co-drafted the bipartisan Dignity Act, but it stands little chance of passage in the current Congress.
The US signed asylum-related post-war international treaties after World War II, the Holocaust and European refugee crises, yet these principles seem to have vanished. This is frustrating for anyone with a moral and humane stance. We must address the needs of asylum seekers and reform immigration policies. A progressive faction in the US advocates for human rights, but the principle gains minimal traction in US politics, which is a system heavily reliant on material interests, money and campaign contributions.
What needs to happen is for the business community to play a more influential role in lobbying for sensible immigration reform and asylum policies. Why? Although their lobbying would not likely be out of a commitment to human rights, but more out of their interests in enlarging the labor force and consumer economy. The US faces labor shortages, and businesses stand to benefit from an expanded consumer economy. If more settled individuals buy homes, cars, etc., their security and citizenship status would be advantageous for business interests.
And addressing the DACA situation is crucial. Many young people brought here at an early age are unfamiliar with their countries of origin. Educated in US schools, they lack proficiency in their home country's language in many cases. They urgently need a secure pathway to citizenship. Undocumented individuals in this country, estimated at around 11 million people, also require a route to eventual citizenship.
In this polarized and divided Congress, these changes could occur if the business community collaborates with progressive individuals who prioritize human rights. This is urgent. Otherwise, leaders like Trump, Nikki Haley, or DeSantis could drastically change the country, with talk of extreme border security, mass camps, and even the invasion of our friendly neighbor, Mexico.
What kind of country would we become if such policies were implemented? In the past, some members of Congress sought policies penalizing individuals like social workers, teachers, and even priests, for withholding information about undocumented individuals. The rhetoric used in the last Republican debates was concerning, particularly suggestions for targeted bombings in Mexico to tackle the fentanyl problem. The collateral damage (a euphemism for massacres of innocent civilians) and increased numbers of refugees would be catastrophic for our borderlands. We have approximately 14 million people on both sides of the border, and such actions would disrupt life severely.
The upcoming elections in 2024 will determine what kind of country we're evolving into. Will it be a country of camps akin to World War II or the Soviet Union, or will it uphold basic principles of fairness, freedom, and democracy?
Where do borders function well?
Yeah, in this book, Border Politics and the Global Era, with the subtitle 'Comparative Politics’ I examined borders on a global scale. One chapter focuses on Europe and the inception of the European Union, which was created initially to stimulate economies after World War II, but has moved forward in a big way to create and fund the idea of Euroregions, fostering cross-border cooperation through institutions, infrastructure funding, civic engagement, and innovative policies. There has been much investment aimed to foster a European identity while respecting national institutions and distinct languages and cultures within each country.
But as you know, I'm obsessed about reading international news. In the last year, there's been a rightward turn in some European national elections, with some parties promoting an anti-immigration theme. For example, Italy elected extreme right-wing party officials. Just in the last few weeks, in the Netherlands, the right-wing party won the largest number of seats. The Netherlands is still a multi-party system, but as they build their coalition to manage policymaking in the Netherlands, the dominant party is probably going to take a more isolationist turn as much as it can within the context of the European Union.
And there are, you know, haters, right? They group together in parties that represent people who hate migrants, especially people of color from the global south. Hungary is probably the best example of a country that has warped formerly somewhat democratic institutions into a system that now serves the interests of a right-wing party and politician, in their case, Viktor Orban. Some of the other Eastern European countries that have an authoritarian streak in their recent histories have moved in that direction as well. The right-wing is alive and well in parties in Europe, despite the overarching European Union and all the benefits that people have derived from that. So we can learn from that.
Oh, and another important thing that really was emphasized in this book is that I worked with a graduate student to develop a database system of land borders.
I was going to bring this up.
There are 300 land borders in this world. Using existing data, (imperfect data as we use national gross domestic product (GDP)), we compared countries who shared borders to identify “border inequality ratios.” We have a giant database of countries and countries that range from equal to extremely unequal border pairs. For example, the US-Mexico border, despite the trading relationship we've had for so many years, and despite NAFTA, which was implemented in 1994 and now has been recently replaced by the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement, the inequality ratio was more unequal than even I expected. The US side was five times richer than the Mexico side. And surprisingly, NAFTA didn't really change the gaps between the US and Mexico over its quarter-century history. The US and Canada are relatively equal. When it came to looking at the legal minimum wage on both sides of the US-Mexico central borderlands, the US legal minimum wage was 10 times more than the legal minimum wage in Mexico. And that's what all of these foreign-owned factories benefit from. Thankfully, when Mexico's president was elected, he promised to increase the legal minimum wage at the border. Mexico doubled the legal minimum wage in 2020 and increased it every year thereafter in its Minimum Wage Committee. At the time I wrote the book, the legal minimum in Mexico was eight to nine US equivalent dollars per day. So people were earning in a whole day what people on the US side were earning in about an hour, depending on whether they were getting the minimum or more.
I believe that analyzing border inequality ratios through legal minimum wage comparisons is one of the best ways to understand things. One of the most unequal borders is Israel-Palestine, to be sure. Other extremely unequal pairs include Spain-Morocco (Spain has enclave regions in North Africa), Yemen-Oman, Finland-Russia, and countries surrounding Afghanistan. Since the European Union began, the unequal pairs of borderlands, the formerly Eastern Europe and Western Europe countries have become more equal. It should be noted that free labor movement exists within EU countries. Wherever there are unequal borders, there's a stimulus to migration, of course. If people can cross to work, even if it's temporary migration, they may be able to earn money and bring it back for their families.