How have U.S. border policies affected attitudes toward migrants and violence against them?

Newswise — On Aug. 3, 2019, a shooter killed 23 people and injured two dozen more in an El Paso, Texas, Walmart. The gunman, who posted an anti-immigration manifesto online before the shooting, targeted Latinos. He was convicted of federal hate crimes. Gilberto Rosas, who grew up in El Paso, is the department chair and a professor of Latina/Latino Studies and of anthropology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of “Unsettling: The El Paso Massacre, Resurgent White Nationalism, and the US-Mexico Border.” At the fifth anniversary of the mass shooting, he spoke about border policies and how they affect attitudes toward migrants.

You described in your book how the border looked very different when you were growing up and crossed it almost daily. What compelled you to write about border policies and how they’ve changed?

As a Chicano scholar from El Paso vested in critical work, I felt compelled to write about the horrendous mass shooting that occurred at a Walmart in my hometown. What is unsettling about the shooting is how it marks what was the culmination of U.S. enforcement practices amplified by the fire of white nationalism.

“Unsettling” draws border scholarship, settler colonial studies and ethnographic research together with the work of immigration attorneys and border activists to critically analyze the mass shooting. It shows how 30-plus years of militarized border enforcement, which began during the Clinton administration, set the stage for the shooting.

I left El Paso days before the shooting. I had spent much of the summer of 2019 there working on a research project on border crossing as refuge, informed by the history of my family, which arrived in El Paso early in the 20th century, fleeing the Mexican Revolution. Activists and attorneys recounted harrowing testimonies of family separation through cruel bureaucratic machinations engineered by the Trump administration.

Such stories, I argue, are part of the material conditions that gave rise to the unthinkable: the targeting of Mexican nationals and those who appeared as them in that Walmart by a white nationalist. 

The U.S.-Mexico border used to be different. It was not nearly as difficult to cross. People would flow across it easier, even those who lacked citizenship. I would regularly cross it for lunch or to go dancing. My first kiss was in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, opposite El Paso. But since the Clinton administration, a series of Border Patrol campaigns hardened the border, forcing undocumented border crossers to take more risks and cross into dangerous terrain. Some 10,000 people have died since the 1990s crossing into the U.S. and countless others ended up in detention, while there is a concentration of militarized law enforcement at work in the border region, affecting ordinary life.

What effect does increased policing of borders have on attitudes toward the people who are crossing the border? What role does it play in violence against migrants such as the El Paso massacre?

I argue in “Unsettling” that the increasing militarized enforcement practices at the border have had a perverse effect of hardening attitudes and dispositions toward migrants from the Global South. They are taken as security threats, as racial invaders, inflaming white nationalism, which has a long history in the U.S. Indeed, the killer posted a racist screed on social media before the shooting in which he spoke of an “Hispanic invasion” and highlighted another mass shooting that occurred at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand. Both shooters subscribe to the “Great Replacement,” or the white supremacist anxiety that nonwhite migrants are replacing whites.

Five years after the El Paso massacre, what has changed about our border policies or attitudes toward migrants?

Despite the partisan divisions of the election, there is a bipartisan consensus about the border that enforcement must persist. 

I underscore that the difference between Republican and Democratic efforts is a matter of degree. The Border Patrol campaigns that I spoke about earlier began in a Democratic administration. The difference today is discursive: Trump’s vile rhetoric about migrants from the Global South, such as characterizing them as rapists and drug traffickers, cannot be overlooked, and the effects include emboldened white nationalists like the killer in El Paso. 

Meanwhile, according to recent study, the Biden administration has deported more people than the Trump administration, and there has been a real clampdown on the internationally recognized right of asylum at the southern U.S. border.

What are some alternatives to control entry into the U.S. without militarizing the border?

I am pessimist of the intellect but an optimist of the will. I would argue that effective decriminalization of the border matters. To that end, imagine if we were to put all the money spent on militarized border enforcement and surveillance into something better. It would be a world where borders were rendered peaceful, where borders were meant to be crossed. The emphasis on militarized enforcement has a tremendous human and financial cost. 

To move away from border enforcement would be part of a larger project for a better world, one where the carceral logic of dealing with social problems, like mass incarceration, is put to bed and emergent freedoms beckon.

We can do better. We must.