Colourblindness across borders: The de-racialized logics of Dutch and American border agents
| Published date | 01 August 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13624806231209997 |
| Author | Irene I Vega,Maartje van der Woude |
| Date | 01 August 2024 |
Colourblindness across
borders: The de-racialized
logics of Dutch and American
border agents
Irene I Vega
University of California, USA
Maartje van der Woude
Leiden University, Netherlands
Abstract
This article illustrates how US Border Patrol agents and Dutch Military and Border Police
officers explainracialized border controloutcomes, through colourblindideologies. These
ideologies—legalism, criminalization and securitization—function as euphemisms that
allow border agents to downplay the importance of immigrants’race/ethnicity in their
decision making andbehaviour. Yet, underlying these colourblind ideologies are racialized
immigration laws and social constructions that continue to produce group-based inequal-
ities in who is questioned, arrested, detained and removed by border guards. We call for
cross-national comparisons of howrace/ethnicity is both manifested and concealed in bor-
der control. We also suggest the existence ofsupranationalracial frames that protect the
status quo in western immigration policies and practices.
Keywords
Borders, colourblind, ethnicity, profiling, race
Equal co-authorship, names listed in alphabetical order.
Corresponding author:
Irene I Vega, Department of Sociology, University of California Irvine, Irvine, CA 92617, USA.
Email: ivega@uci.edu
Article
Theoretical Criminology
2024, Vol. 28(3) 309–327
© The Author(s) 2023
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/13624806231209997
journals.sagepub.com/home/tcr
Introduction
Race in the USA and its multiple analogous concepts in Europe (e.g. ethnicity, culture,
nationality) are the basis for exclusionary and criminalizing policies that narrow the
mobility and belonging of groups deemed undesirable in the Global North (Bosworth
et al., 2018). Despite its omnipresence and power, race/ethnicity is often concealed
under colourblind ideologies that convey racial meaning in more culturally acceptable
ways (Hellgren and Bereményi, 2022). The colourblind ideologies that dominate
American and European immigration discourse have distinct origins. In the USA, a
country founded on racial difference, the turn towards colourblindness came in the
Civil Rights era when explicit racism was replaced by a more covert, ‘New Racism’
(Bonilla-Silva, 2006). By contrast, in Europe, colourblindness constitutes a more funda-
mental ‘racial denial’that has long characterized the continent but grew particularly
salient after the atrocities of the Second World War (Goldberg, 2006). Colourblindness
—whether it is a relatively recent shift or a more enduring model—is pernicious
because it constrains our ability to recognize racism, thus thwarting collective responses
against it. Studying colourblind ideologies, their impact and function across national con-
texts is important if we are to contend with the growing racial inequalities of a globalized
world (Beaman and Petts, 2020).
To understand colourblindness across national contexts, we examine how Dutch and
American border agents justify racialized border control outcomes in their respective
countries. The USA and the Netherlands are western liberal democracies that differ on
governmental structures, immigration histories, approaches to social policy and their con-
ceptualization of race. Despite these differences, Dutch and American border controls
produce similarly racialized outcomes and agents justify these unequal outcomes with
similar ideologies. Through qualitative fieldwork, we distil three ideologies—legalism,
criminalization and securitization—that agents use to explain racialized border outcomes
as the product of something else. When agents appeal to legalism, they attribute their
decisions to laws, policies and guidelines, negating that immigrant stereotypes inform
their behaviour—this is the most strictly colourblind ideology we identify. While the
criminalization and securitization logics also deny racial/ethnic discrimination, these
logics more readily betray the racial constructions that undergird agents’assumptions.
When agents adopt a logic of criminalization, they inadvertently reveal racialized con-
structions about immigrant deviance, while the securitization logic reveals an amorphous
sense of danger linked to Muslim Middle Easterners specifically.
Literature review
Race and migration
Our starting point for this analysis is that bordering regimes are inherently racialized.
Whether they be deployed in the name of sovereignty, security or rule of law, bordering
practices ‘construct “Europe”and “the West”as normatively white spaces, under threat
from racialized Others within and without’(Baker, 2021: 124). In North America, gov-
ernments build walls, both physical and virtual, to exclude various groups racialized as
310 Theoretical Criminology 28(3)
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