What Happens to “Humanitarian Borderwork” in Transit Countries? The Case of Mexico

Guest post by Amalia Campos-Delgado (Leiden University) and Karine Côté-Boucher (Université de Montréal). This post is part of a collaboration between Border Criminologies and Geopolitics that seeks to promote open access platforms.

Introduction

Carlos, a Mexican border agent, asks himself: “Who am I working for? Who do we stop so many migrants for? If they don’t even want to stay here … they want to go north”. His pondering is a powerful testimony of the quandaries and geopolitical entanglements around borderwork in transit countries. In Mexico, where humanitarian borderwork has been inscribed in  migration law since 2011, border agents face a dilemma: they must control migrants, deport them quickly, but they are also expected to take care of them. And this, in a situation where their working conditions are precarious, resources scarce, and the detention conditions offered to migrants are appalling.

What can Carlos and his colleagues do? In our article Tactics of Empathy: The Intimate Geopolitics of Mexican Migrant Detention we draw on the narratives of Mexican borderworkers as well as on archival information obtained through freedom of information requests, and analyse the dynamics of humanitarian borderwork in detention in Mexico.

The intimate geopolitics of humanitarian borderwork

Care-control is now acknowledged as a common strategy for governing migrant populations. Conceptualised as humanitarian borderwork, this seemingly oxymoronic approach responds to the moral condemnation of the violence inflicted on migrants while maintaining the securitising and exclusionary approach that encourages this violence in the first place. A growing literature also sheds light on the practices and perceptions of those who enforce these control regimes as well as on their legitimising narratives. Drawing on the notion “global intimate” we bring these two literatures together and explore what we call the intimate geopolitics of humanitarian borderwork.

In doing so, we pay attention to the entanglements of geopolitics and the everyday arrangements of migration control. The intimate nature of humanitarian borderwork unfolds, on the one hand, in the whitewashing salvationist rhetoric that allows borderworkers to reconcile themselves with the moral ambiguity of their work and, on the other hand, in the ambivalent and condescending relationships that the care-control approach fosters.

In this sense, if policing at a distance is central to the geopolitics of migration management, what humanitarian bordering encourages on a day-to-day basis are rapports which, while being intimate, are tinged with an implicit moral distancing. Intimacy in detention, while influenced by prison infrastructure, is the result of borderworkers’ moral strategies of coping and redemption. It is also a strategic response to a regime that individualises responsibility for the care of migrants, making borderworkers accountable for this regime. Such analysis brings nuance to the dichotomous discussion that frames borderworkers as either pawns or automatons.

Mexico’s humanitarian border

The Mexican Transit Control Regime (MTRC) is an interesting case study to examine the intersections between the global and the intimate in migration control. In operation since 2001, the MTCR is the product of the externalisation of US bordering into Mexico. As has been the case in other transit regimes, the geopolitical arrangements of migration management have transformed Mexico’s border control politics.

Mexico internalised its migration control by turning its entire territory into a border-zone. Together with the generalised violence in the country, restrictive bordering policies and practices generated a climate of insecurity for migrants. Following civil society struggles to ensure migrants a better protection, Mexican authorities shifted their formula from a criminalizing to a humanitarian one.

Has this humanitarian approach that aims to “care” for migrants translated into human rights-aligned practices and structural measures? The short answer is no. The MTCR relies on a political economy of scarcity and this is not only reflected in the precarious and appalling material conditions in Mexican migrant detention facilities, but also in the borderworkers’ labour conditions. We show that this context creates peculiar relationships of proximity and distance between borderworkers and detained migrants.

Tactics of empathy

What happens when despite inadequate infrastructures and limited resources, borderworkers must be able to preserve order, discipline and harmonious coexistence in migrant detention? Paying particular attention to the day-to-day arrangements involved in the enforcement of migration control and, borrowing from William Walters, we identify three ‘tactics of empathy’ deployed by Mexican borderworkers: (1) Blame avoidance and blame-shifting, (2) Institutional cooptation and individualisation of responsibility, and (3) Enforced commiseration. Through these tactics agents morally legitimise border control and migrant detention, avoid legal liabilities, and discipline migrants. We argue that the combination of material precariousness and institutionalised care-control leads to a rationalisation of care and empathy in migrant detention. This rationalisation is more than the individual reactions of burnt-out officials; it shows a broken migration management system that is being pushed to its limits on a daily basis.

The analysis of care-control arrangements and the instrumentalisation of care and empathy by borderworkers is only one of many aspects in which the everyday practices of border control are shaped by geopolitical arrangements and institutional settings. Yet, it is a powerful way to see in practice the ontological inequality between human beings that is promoted by humanitarianism. It also  sheds light on how the complex and convoluted everyday realities of migrant detention are related to long-established structures of inequality and exclusion in North America.

The case of Mexico’s humanitarian border helps us to move away from the tendency to conceptualise the deterritorialised reorganisation of border policing and migrant carceralities from the point of view of destination countries. Finally, it is useful to problematise the geopolitical arrangements in the management of migration control and how this transforms migration policing in transit countries.

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