The Border Thickens: In‐Securing Communities after IRCA
| Published date | 01 April 2016 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/imig.12198 |
| Author | Gilberto Rosas |
| Date | 01 April 2016 |
The Border Thickens: In-Securing
Communities after IRCA
Gilberto Rosas*
ABSTRACT
This article analyses a certain ‘thickening of the border,’a term I coin to underscore a certain
blurring of the insides and the outsides of the United States with respect to Latin American,
primarily Mexican, immigration. In making this intervention, the article underscores the link-
ages among a dark legacy of the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), the militariza-
tion of Border Patrol policing practices in the southwestern United States, and “Secure
Communities,”a mammoth immigration policing program across much of the United States.
THE BORDER THICKENS: IN-SECURING COMMUNITIES AFTER IRCA
The US Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) grants the United States Border Patrol extraordi-
nary powers “within a reasonable distance from any external boundary of the United States”. The
Attorney General of the United States has determined that “reasonable distance”includes all areas
within 100 miles of US land and sea borders (Wasem et al., 2004: 13).
1
Drawing on a series of
laws and court decisions, federal agents may stop and search individuals at will, under conditions
that would be considered unconstitutional in the interior of the country. These powers include the
ability to enter private property without a warrant; the ability to establish interior checkpoints where
agents may stop, question and search all individuals and vehicles who pass through them; the abil-
ity to commit random stops and searches through roving patrols; and the ability to treat individuals
stopped in proximity to the border as though they are legally outside US territory, for purposes of
immigration and inspection. Six million people live near the US-Mexico border alone, while urban
centres along the east and west coasts of the United States represent the largest population corridors
in the United States. Moreover, phenomena once largely reserved for the US-Mexico border region,
including mass deportation,
2
insidious policing, mass detention of immigrants, and racial anxieties
about immigrants cum Latinos, hold deep ties to the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986
(IRCA), culminating in what I term the thickening of the border.
The United States deported a record number of individuals in 2011, due largely to rapidly expand-
ing federal immigration programmes that rely on local law enforcement, such as “Secure Communi-
ties.”The statistics are sobering. Annual deportations have increased over 400 per cent since 1996;
more than a million people have been removed from the country since the beginning of the Obama
administration. Some 300,000 more are currently in deportation proceedings, but have not been
removed (Kolhi et al., 2011). Between 1997 and 2012, the US government carried out 4.2 million
deportations. This figure amounts to more than twice the sum total of every deportation before 1997
(1.9 million people). The vast majority of early all of these recent deportees have been Latino men,
* University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
doi: 10.1111/imig.12198
©2015 The Author
International Migration ©2015 IOM
International Migration Vol. 54 (2) 2016
ISSN 0020-7985Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
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